


Untitled And Incomplete

by snurgle



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Accidental Death, Angst, Episode: e060-066 The Stolen Century Parts 1-7, F/M, Grief/Mourning, I Wrote This Because I Hate Myself, Miscarriage, Only Exists To Cause Pain, Puberty 2, Second puberty, Seriously Don’t Read Unless You’re Ready To Be Hurt, Spoilers for Episode: e060-066 The Stolen Century Parts 1-7, Time To Feel Sad, Trans Character, Trans Female Character, Transitioning, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-09-05 20:53:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20279650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snurgle/pseuds/snurgle
Summary: Taako wakes up after a very untimely death in the last cycle to find his sister has somehow magicked her reproductive organs to life.Lup had started it all as an experiment. The resets were supposed to be a safeguard; should anything go wrong, it would all be set right again in the next cycle. It seemed like a good idea at the time, before their ship landed them in a strange and surprisingly hostile world, and before Lup’s experiment took a very unexpected turn.





	Untitled And Incomplete

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cicada_s](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicada_s/gifts).

> This isn’t the first time that I got an idea that bothered me so much, I had to write it.  
Please, for the love of everything holy, READ THE TAGS of this fic before you read the story itself.   
I feel like shit today, so here I go, spreading the Feels Like Shit disease to everyone who bothers to read my garbage stories. Read it. Weep, because I’m an empty flesh husk of a man who cannot feel when it is meant to.   
Don’t expect this author note to make any sense. I’m a literal hissing shrew right now.  
Just read the tags, for fuck’s sake. READ THE TAGS. I’m not about to go triggering anyone’s PTSD without giving them a proper warning first.  
READ THE GODFORSAKEN TAGS.  
This is an impulse-written crywank of a story that I made because my friend made the mistake of encouraging me to write it. We both like to hurt ourselves with word porn. Hopefully you do too.

The new plane where the Starblaster had landed was a strange one.

Upon arrival, the world’s surface had seemed to be a barren, empty face of rock. That, it turned out, had been a misjudgement by the ship’s sensors. When the Starblaster descended through the thick cloud layer that caked the atmosphere, they found that the world underneath was a lush, temperate forest. The ship had descended through the thick green canopy and found thin, rocky soil on the ground. Little could grow in the shade of the massive trees. Traveling outward, the IPRE crew found that the forest came to an end a few dozen miles beyond their landing site, giving way to a broad, grassy valley. There, at the edge of the woods, was the spot where Davenport had decided to set up camp for the week.

The first month of this cycle had been quieter than most. The Starblaster had landed on uninhabited planets before. Those had actually been some of Taako’s favorite cycles. No strangers to encounter, no societies to worry about collapsing, nobody to save. Just the IPRE crew and the Light of Creation, nothing between them but the terrain. Of course, when the stupid shiny thing landed on the other side of the fucking planet, that presented a little extra challenge. They were never as bad as the hostile worlds they landed in that seized the Light and kept it away from them at all costs, but they still sucked, in their own way. Taako had sat through more than his share of wild goose chases. Most of the time in the empty worlds, they found the Light without too much trouble. When they didn’t, there was nothing there for the Hunger to destroy anyway, so... no harm, no foul, right?

That was the kind of cycle Taako had figured this one was going to be. He’d awoken at the beginning of the new year, spat back out of the void after having met an especially bloody end within week one of the previous cycle. The last run had been a mess, and he figured that this next one was going to be a vacation compared to that. After having run the gamut with so many, he’d learned to clock them early. This had to be number, what, sixty-something? He’d stopped keeping count ages ago.

The morning was an ordinary one, or as ordinary as he could call it when he’d rolled out of bed at ass o’clock in the morning after a rough night of flopping around like a beached dolphin, unable to fall asleep for more than a few minutes at a time. It was far from the first night like it that he’d had since they landed here. 

Clocking this new world as a quiet paradise had been a mistake; that he’d figured out in the first few days. There was something funky about this world- maybe an aura, misaligned chakras, some kind of weird psychic energies or something- he didn’t have a name for it, but he knew one thing, and that was that it wasn’t agreeing with him in the slightest.

He wasn’t the only one who felt it. The weird energy was hitting the whole crew. Anyone who used magic was especially susceptible, that was to say, five out of their crew of seven. Magnus and Davenport managed just fine, nothing more than a minor headache or mild tinnitus every now and again. Taako, on the other hand, was slogging through god-awful early mornings and sleepless nights, afternoons with Merle smoked into a stupor trying to calm down the migraines, and evenings with Lucretia spent pacing circles around the ship’s lab, trying in vain to find a way to block it out. 

So there he was, slumped over the stove in the kitchen, his ears faintly ringing as he dazedly whipped up breakfast for the crew. His head was still pounding as it had been all night. As it was, Taako had never been a morning person, but this shitscape of a planet had brought that sentiment to an entirely new level.

Most of the crew were usually up before him. Lup and Barry were the only frequent stragglers. In this cycle, though, his sister had been just as restless as him. Their new normal would have had her awake, on her feet and next to Taako in the kitchen, her boyfriend slouched in a chair at the table beside them. And yet, last time he checked, Taako was alone today. He blinked his bleary eyes and glanced over his shoulder, looking around the empty room. Still nobody to be seen just yet. It was weird and lonely, but he could cope with it. Maybe she’d actually gotten a good night’s sleep for once and was milking it for all it was worth. If that was the case, he didn’t blame her. He would have gladly given Satan a blowjob if it meant he could get just one night of rest.

Heavy footsteps broke through the buzz in Taako’s ears, and he once again turned around from the stove. This time, he saw Magnus come bumbling in, bright-eyed, ruffled and sweaty, probably fresh from a morning jog. He looked ungodly chipper for this hour. It made Taako want to punch him.

“Mornin’!” Magnus greeted him. He made his way over and settled a broad, warm hand on Taako’s shoulder. “What’re you working on?”

“Omelettes, I think,” Taako mumbled, staring down into the bowl of beaten and seasoned eggs in front of him. “Unless inspiration strikes for something else.”

“You’re planning to put mix-ins into that, right? I think there’s more to omelettes than just eggs.”

“If you’ve got any bright ideas, feel free to check the fridge.”

Magnus did just that, giving Taako another chance to try and convince his shit brain that it was indeed time to be awake. As irritating as it was to know Magnus could be sane and, god forbid,  _ cheerful _ at this hour, plus how much he envied the fact that this world didn’t make Magnus feel like he had an eternal hangover, having him in the room made the kitchen feel a little less like an empty linoleum void. He focused on the noise Magnus made to take the edge off the tinnitus that hummed in his ears. 

A minute later, the fighter was standing next to him at the counter, setting out containers of mushrooms, onions, peppers and chives. He glanced over at the coffeemaker in the corner, then at Taako. “Coffee?”

“Please.”

Magnus set the water boiling and put fresh grounds into the filter, then returned to rummage around in the fridge. Taako was in the middle of dicing mushrooms when something wide, flat, and meaty-sounding was slapped down onto the counter in front of him. “Look what I found!” Magnus announced.

The “something” happened to be a packet of bacon. Taako acknowledged it with an incoherent mumble, followed up by “Cool. Can you get us some pans?”

He did, and while Taako busied himself with eggs and additives, Magnus took over bacon duty. Once breakfast had started sizzling underway on the stove, the rest of the crew came spilling in one by one. Lucretia came first, Captain-port shortly after her. Merle showed up just in time to finish up the first round of omelettes, making Taako crack a few more eggs in anticipation of Barry and Lup showing up. It happened eventually. Or it half-happened, since when Barry found his way into the kitchen, he did so alone.

“Smells great in here,” he remarked, then yawned before going to fix himself a plate. “Morning, Taako. You didn’t sleep either, huh?”

At long last, Taako took a break from nudging around the last portion of omelette in the pan. It no longer looked like an omelette as much as a misshapen lump of yellow and white with a bunch of Lup’s preferred mix-ins scattered around and falling out of it. Ears set back, he turned around to address the rest of the crew. “Anybody seen Lup yet today?”

Magnus shrugged, and Lucretia shook her head. Taako turned a pointed glance at Barry, who put his hands up in defeat. “I’ve got no idea. She stayed in her own room last night. Said she was gonna try a sleeping spell on herself or something. She’s as sick of insomnia as the rest of us.”

With a sigh, Taako set his spatula down. “Guess I’m gonna go check on her, then,” he said. He nudged Barry’s shoulder as he passed him. “You need to keep better track of your girlfriend, my dude.”

Barry laughed. “Look, if she’s actually figured out a way to get some decent sleep, I don’t want to bother her.”

“Then it’s a good thing that’s my job,” Taako said over his shoulder as he headed down the hallway. His sister’s room was situated right next to his. He’d made a special request to have neighboring rooms, and it had been great through the first fifty cycles. Lately that request had started to seem like a mistake, since the Starblaster’s walls weren’t exactly soundproof. It definitely wouldn’t kill her and Barry to keep it down every once in a while. If they absolutely  _ had _ to fuck less than 20 feet away from him with only a flimsy layer of steel and plaster between them, they could at least do it quietly. 

Taako pushed the door open without knocking. “Hey, Lulu?” he called out into the space. “Breakfast’s been going on for, like, an hour. People are starting to ask about you. And by people, I especially mean me.”

The room in front of him was dim, curtains drawn over the single wide porthole that spanned the far wall with a few slivers of light seeping in around their edges. They cast glowing stripes across a lump under the blankets, which stirred lazily as Taako made his way into the room.

“So, have you actually figured out how to sleep in this hellscape, or are you just hanging out under there for shits and giggles?”

The only answer he got was a low, tired groan from the lump.

“Me too, Lup. Join the club.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and gave his sister a gentle shake on what he guessed was her shoulder. “Come on. We’ve got a big day of nothing interesting ahead of us.”

Finally, the lump wriggled up toward the edge of the blankets, and Lup poked her head out. She squinted at Taako through a fluffy mass of blonde hair. “Not now,” she grumbled. “Can’t move.”

“Why not?” He nudged her again, trying to roll her over and make her sit up. “We’ve got work to do. The Light’s still out of our hands, and we haven’t figured out where it’s gone yet.”

Lup didn’t reply, only whined and pawed at the edge of the blankets, trying to burrow under them again, which only encouraged Taako to snatch them from her and pull them back. When he did, her face scrunched up in pain, and he finally saw what had kept her down. His sister was curled up in a tense, shivering ball, doubled over with one arm braced across her stomach.

“Shit,” he blurted out in surprise. “Are you okay?” Before she could respond, he had put his hand on her forehead, feeling for any signs of a fever. He found nothing, but still had to ask. “Did you get sick or something?”

“No,” Lup croaked in response. “Something else. It’s fine, though. I’ll probably be better in a few hours.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“Um...” Lup sighed and scraped her hair back from her forehead. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this for a while. But we’ve been busy, and you were dead for most of the last cycle, so... haven’t had much of a chance.” She inched toward the pillows and struggled to pull herself upright, then looked back down at the spot where she’d been laying. “Ah, fuck. I leaked again.”

Taako glanced down at the bed and gasped. Smeared across the white of Lup’s sheets was a bright red spot of blood. “Holy shit, Lulu, you’re bleeding!”

“Yeah, don’t panic. It’s been going on since last night,” his sister sighed. “I meant to tell you sooner. I’ve kind of got an ongoing project that I’ve been working on since the last cycle.”

There was probably some reasonable way to respond to that sentence, but Taako didn’t have the focus to figure it out right then. The blood and his sister being in pain had him too rattled to put together the pieces from cryptic dialogue. He stared at his sister, eyebrows raised as he waited for an explanation. 

Lup picked up on his confusion easily. “Okay. So... you know how, way the hell back when, when we were kids, I used magic to transition?”

“Uh, yeah? I helped you do it, dummy.”

“Yeah. Stupid question,” Lup went on with a nod. “So, you know I’ve had a vagina for... forever, basically. But it’s never done anything. It’s always just kind of been there.”

“Lup, given the amount of noise I’ve hear you and Barry make, I’m pretty sure that your puss doesn’t do  _ nothing _ .”

Lup’s face flushed bright red. “That’s... that’s different! It’s real from an external standpoint. It looks right, and it feels everything that it should, it just doesn’t... you know, menstruate or do any other vagina things. I didn’t have enough skills behind my magic to make it actually work. Neither of us did.”

“I thought that didn’t bother you though.”

“It didn’t. It doesn’t. Not generally.” Lup looked away and shrugged. “But since we started on the mission, I started thinking... I don’t know if it’s too early in the morning to be sappy, but I think we've gotten stronger. We’ve been building each other up a lot, and for the past few cycles, all the stuff about my transition started coming back to me. I thought that maybe, since I’ve been refining my arts and stuff, I might get a chance to try something new with myself. Last cycle, I figured it was finally time to stop fucking around and shoot my shot.”

“Okay. And you started all this... when?”

“That’s a whole saga in itself. There was a lot of research and development that went into it. I started working on it by myself at the start of the last cycle, and I was going to get you in on it too. I swear that was the plan. But then... you remember what happened.”

Taako shuddered. He certainly did.

“So I was by myself with it for a little longer. After a while, I ended up bringing Lucretia on board. I figured she’d be my second best, since I didn’t have you. Besides, she’s more familiar with the subject matter than either of us are. I was really nervous about it, what with how hard it is to do permanent body alterations in the first place and everything. I was really scared of fucking something up, but I figured that if things  _ did _ end up screwy, they’d just be undone in the next reset. So whatever happened, I’d probably be fine. We kept working on it over the cycle, and we still have been, up until last night.” In spite of her pain, Lup was smiling. “We finally locked it down.”

“So that’s...” Taako looked back and forth from the blood smear to his sister’s face, then to the matching stain on the inseam of her pajama shorts. It took a minute for it all to sink in. “Oh my god, you’re...”

“Getting my first period. Yeah,” Lup finished for him, letting out a laugh that bubbled with excitement. “I cast the charm on myself last night and it worked right away. I was happy for about an hour before the cramps kicked in. They are an absolute  _ bitch _ .”

“Sure looks like it,” Taako remarked. “Holy shit, Lup. This is... this is so cool! I mean, it looks like it sucks. It definitely does. But the fact that you did it...” His sister’s smile had gone and infected him, and now he was beaming excitedly back at her.

“That’s what I thought you’d say,” Lup giggled. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but first you were dead, then we were trying to navigate this whole new plane, and it just never came up.”

“Water under the bridge, Lulu,” Taako assured her with a wave of his hand. “So how’d you do it? You’re not a transfigurer. That’s my whole schtick. Did you, like... evoke a working uterus into your body?”

“Yeah. Something like that,” Lup replied, wincing her way through another cramp. “Look, I’d love to talk this all out right now, but I’ve kind of got a situation on my hands.”

“Oh, fuck. Yeah, of course.” Taako was on his feet in a second, holding a hand out to Lup to help pull her to her feet. “You need anything? Water? Some painkillers?”

“I can get both in the bathroom.” Lup crawled to the edge of the bed and grabbed her brother’s hand. It was a whole endeavor to get her out of the pained Fibonacci spiral that she’d curled herself up into. He tugged, her feet landed on the floor and she groaned as she slowly forced her spine to unbend. “While I’m fixing my shit up, let Lucretia know that the spell worked and send her my way. I’m gonna need a hand with all this blood and junk. And don’t tell Barry yet. I want to do that myself.”

“Noted.” Taako let her lean against his shoulder as she limped to the bathroom. Once she was settled there with a change of clothes, he made a beeline for Lucretia. She was with Merle and Magnus near the bay doors at the moment, gearing up to venture outside and keep on searching the area for the Light of Creation. He caught her attention and pulled her aside, just out of earshot of the other two, and let her know in detail about Lup’s condition. He watched a huge smile bloom on her face as he explained the situation, and she called out to her adventuremates that she was going to need a few extra minutes. Taako followed her to the bathroom, wondering what she was going to do to get Lup out of the predicament she was in. He hung back in the corner and let Lucretia walk his sister through the motions of pads and tampons and whatnot. He tried to pay attention as much as he could without making it weird. Whatever Lucretia said and did, it was probably going to end up being important later.

In ten minutes, Lup was cleaned up, showered and dressed. Davenport was slated to hold down the fort that day, staying on the Starblaster while the rest of his crew headed out and searched the surface for the Light. Lucretia teamed back up with Merle and Magnus, and Taako was grouped together with Lup and Barry. Traveling on foot, they passed through all the area they’d covered the day before and slid down the rock face to search the valley. 

They’d seen the Light of Creation land only a few hours after they did. It wasn’t right on top of them when it came, but it hadn’t looked like it would be too far to reach. Tens of miles, at the most. They had run into similar situations on plenty of other empty planets, and the Light was usually back in their hands before the first week was out. This time, however, after a month of nonstop searching, the light was still nowhere to be seen. Even with the weird energies of this world scrambling the brains of every magic user in the crew, their abilities still worked just fine (Lup was more than enough proof of that). Every search was simply coming up empty. It was as if the Light had landed, then immediately dissolved into thin air. It wasn’t gone, though; even though they’d lost track of it, the Hunger had still managed to hunt it down. They’d all seen the eyes in the sky, and even if this world didn’t have anyone in it that needed to be saved, it was still preferable for them not to just let the Hunger consume planes willy-nilly. 

A few miles into the valley and they started running into trees again. Or, upon closer inspection, things that looked like but were not actually trees. Merle would have been able to categorize them better; they were the size of trees, but the trunks looked too green and too soft to be wood. They looked more like giant shrubs or massively overgrown house plants. Over the course of the day, the three of them climbed their way down to the bottom of the valley, landing in a narrow, grassy pathway between the plateaus of earth. That was where they decided to stop and rest, as well as where Lup broke the news to her boyfriend.

Barry’s face lit up with a smile, and he glowed increasingly brighter with pride as Lup explained to him how she’d accomplished what she did. She hadn’t told him yet because she’d wanted it to be a surprise. Taako couldn’t fathom why, but he figured that was her business. He was happy enough to see Barry’s stupid grin and watch him wrap his sister up in his arms, lift her off her feet and spin her around. As gross and mushy as it was, Taako found it pretty heartwarming. However the rest of the day went, he was sure nothing could kill their collective good mood. 

What came later didn’t quite ruin things. However, it definitely threw a wrench into the works.

The Starblaster had been cruising over the surface of this world for a whole month, and it had taken the crew this long just to get out of the massive forest where they had landed. This place seemed just as empty as any of the other uninhabited places they’d landed. That was why, when Barry pointed out the towering shape of something sharp and angular silhouetted against the soft green curves of the valley, all three of them got confused.

That shape, as it turned out, was a massive structure of welded rods cast from a dark, prismatic metal. It was tall, a wide base that tapered into a narrow tower as it climbed toward the clouds before the rods abruptly exploded outward like the branches of a skeletal tree. They tangled and wove around each other and stuck out at odd angles, their sharp lines pointing in every conceivable direction. 

At first, Taako guessed it must have been the remains of some old building. From a distance, it had looked weather-beaten and unraveled enough. But as they drew closer, it quickly became apparent how wrong he was. They’d landed on empty planets where society had collapsed and people were gone. Structures there were all crumbling, rusted-out and abandoned. This was new, or at least maintained well. The metal gleamed in the grey sunlight like it was freshly polished, not a spot of rust or tarnish to be seen. From this, they could gather two things; one, this structure hadn’t been built long ago and left to rot after all the residents of this world died about, and two, whoever had built it had intentionally made it look like  _ that _ . On top of all that, the structure was, as Barry described it, warm to the touch. 

He pointed that out after Lup had woken him up, since touching the structure with his bare hand had sent him reeling backwards until he collapsed in the grass with a spontaneously bleeding nose.

They took a note of it, called it an anomaly, and rushed Barry back to the ship to get his nosebleed treated. The next day, they ventured back out to show the rest of the crew what they had found. An anomaly, all of them agreed. They quickly took it back when, a half-mile further down the valley, they found another structure standing just as tall and twisted as the first, and the long silhouette of another one looming in the distance.

* * *

The rest of the week disappeared with still no sign of the Light of Creation. No new leads meant that it was time to pick up the Starblaster and move on. In accordance with the new findings, Davenport determined that they should follow the line of metal structures. Maybe they had a source, and if they searched hard enough, they might find a civilization of some kind.

More importantly, Lup rode out the rest of her period and made it through with flying colors. It went on for six days, plaguing her with cramps, headaches, mood swings and the whole gallery of issues that Taako quickly learned were just part of the package of having a working uterus. He, Lucretia and Barry did all they could to walk his sister through her newfound issues.

As rough as it was, Taako couldn’t ignore that through it all, Lup was taking all her problems in stride. No, it was more than just that. Lup was  _ thriving _ . Sure, it got annoying when her cramps were so bad that she couldn’t get out of bed in the morning, or when she suddenly felt angry and couldn’t explain why, or when she craved cheese fries so badly she couldn’t stomach anything else. The changes were their own special hell to go through, but Lup bore it all with a smile, and Taako knew his sister well enough to be sure that it was a genuine one. 

Lup had said before that not having a period didn’t bother her, but there was an extra something to her that Taako didn’t have a name for. The opposite of gender dysphoria... gender euphoria? He was sure he’d heard that term somewhere. Whatever it was, it seemed to light her up a little bit brighter. She had always wanted to know what this felt like, and now that she finally did, she was living for every second of it. Taako couldn’t have been happier for her. 

And so the weeks rolled on, and the Starblaster continued its roving course over the surface of the world. The Light of Creation wasn’t turning up still, but Davenport remained determined. Month two eased slowly by, then month three. Taako was pretty confident that they weren’t going to achieve anything and it was about time to call it quits. But the crew needed a unanimous vote to make decisions like that, and most people who weren’t Taako were still determined to find the Light and do all they could to save this plane.

As they traveled, they came across more and more of the strange metal structures. Lucretia sketched each and every one; no two were exactly alike, and each of them seemed just as clean and well-kept as the last. Perhaps strangest of all, casting Detect Magic over them turned up nothing. They definitely had an energy of some kind to them. It hit harder with magic users, since Merle and Taako had both put themselves out just as Barry had with the first one, but it wasn’t just affecting them; the weirdly warm structures even made Magnus cringe when he touched them.

However they did what they did, it was something entirely separate from magic. On the bright side, though, it seemed they had finally figured out where the weird miasma of  _ endless hangover _ was coming from. Merle and Lucretia set about demystifying the problem and trying to solve it while the rest of them carried on with the mission at hand.

On Lucretia’s advice, Lup started tracking her cycle. Her period started during the last week of every month, like clockwork. It probably helped that she had to recast the spell regularly to keep its effects running at full tilt. As each cycle passed, she learned to anticipate and prepare for them; PMS and bleeding were still ungodly bitches to deal with, but they were ones that Lup was steadily learning to tame. 

Downtime was rare, and downtime that was actually quiet and  _ worth _ calling downtime was even more so. Taako usually took that time for himself; even the decades of adventuring with the crew hadn’t totally undone his tendency to get irritated when cooped up in the same small space with the same people for days on end (that was the one thing that got on his nerves about uninhabited worlds; no people and no cities meant there was nothing to do and no one to see, other than work and the rest of the crew). This time around, though, he found himself drawn to spend every moment he could spare at Lup’s side.

It might have been because he’d died so suddenly and missed the entirety of the last cycle. It probably was. He had lost out on a  _ lot _ of important stuff by not being alive. He hadn’t been able to work with her on this project and walk her through the creative process (and he totally  _ wasn’t _ jealous of Lucretia for that one, definitely not jealous  _ at all _ ), and she’d kept her thoughts on the subject so quiet before that even  _ he _ hadn’t been able to tell that something was on her mind. It was a huge comfort to know that she’d sorted it out. After dragging her out of bed that first morning, Taako swore to himself that this time around he’d do a better job of being there for his sister.

That had quickly turned into an exercise in patience, since she had a boyfriend now and spending time with Lup generally meant also spending time with Barry and being subjected to all their gross, nasty, adorable romantic garbage. Over the cycles, the two of them hadn’t exactly gotten more subtle about how goddamn in-love they were. Taako made a solemn promise to future Taako that once they got off this planet and made their way somewhere else, he’d do everything in his power to cleanse himself of the total overflow of heterosexuality in his life. Maybe the next world might have a vibrant gay nightlife waiting for him or something like that. He’d have to wait for that, though. This world had nothing for him but giant trees and big metal headache towers.

At the very least, the headache towers weren’t a problem for too much longer. Along with the onset of period number four for Lup, Merle and Lucretia finally made a breakthrough in their work on the planet’s weird energy effects. They figured out that the trees gave off pulses of electrical energy in a very specific pattern, the beats so close together that they were indistinguishable from each other when played at their regular speed. Taako had been the one to figure out how to slow them down and read them, and from then on every magic user went all-in to work out a way to counter the energy’s effects. 

Two weeks later, they’d fashioned seven small wearable devices, hooked over the ear like hands-free headsets, which emitted a series of energy pulses to combat those coming from the metal towers. The moment Taako put his on, his migraine suddenly vanished, and he promptly fell into bed for the next 48 hours and refused to move for anyone or anything. Sleep had evaded him this long, and like hell was he going to let it get away from him any longer.

Now that the crew was back in proper working order, finding the Light of Creation would surely be easier. Taako hoped so anyway. It didn’t seem like dodging the hangover energies had helped them on that front, because the Light was still nowhere to be seen, and it had come time for them to pick up and travel onward again. Davenport had no trail to follow, only more weird metal trees, but Taako tried not to think too much about it. There were much more pressing matters for him to worry about.

The last week of month five had come and gone, and something definitely wasn’t right about Lup.

Taako had learned to catch on to Lup’s PMS vibes almost as soon as she started feeling them. He anticipated that within the next few days, she’d need him to bring her painkillers and a glass of water, or to mix up a cheese sauce or melt some chocolate, or to listen to her while she rambled angrily about various minor inconveniences, or whatever else she would need when the hormones finally struck. 

He waited, but it never happened. His sister’s mood had stayed level, there were no sudden cravings for salt or sugar, no mornings that required extra assistance to get her out of bed. Taako stayed on high alert; maybe this was nothing more than Lup getting better at managing her body’s cycles; but after the lifetime he’d been through, he was almost sure that wasn’t the case. The other shoe was going to drop sometime soon, and he could already feel it hovering overhead.

It finally came down when one day, he and Lup were sent out to investigate a blip which had come up on the ship’s sensors. A nearby burst of energy, though unspecific what kind, was settled below the ground where the Starblaster had landed. A quick survey of the area revealed an entrance to a cave, one too small for the ship to fit, so the twins had volunteered to look into it.

Lup had been tense for a while. At first, Taako had assumed that her period had finally caught up with her, but this was a different kind of tension than her usual brand. She was quiet, withdrawn and cold, something which Taako hadn’t seen from her since before she and Barry had gotten together. He would have been glad to pry into it, but Lup seemed to have closed herself off. Whatever was going on, she didn’t want to talk about it, and it hadn’t yet gotten bad enough for him to want to back her into a corner about it.

She stayed focused while they ventured in, following the light cast from their stones of far speech. Taako tried to make conversation, but Lup seemed to consistently clam up after more than a few sentences. The silence of the cavern was broken only by their footsteps in the dirt, settling over Taako and squeezing him like a cold, heavy blanket. Lucretia was tracking them from above, and she was supposed to let them know when they were close to the energy source, but until then he’d be stuck walking through the oppressive silence. He studied the cave walls to try and take his mind off of it, but what he found didn’t make him feel any better. The stone was scratched and broken; deep cuts ran along the walls in groups of three, four and five, evenly spaced, as if some unspeakably large mole had scraped the rock away as it tunneled into the earth. Taako wasn’t sure what kind of cave he and his sister had thoughtlessly wandered into, but the crew was depending on them, and he couldn’t exactly tell her that he wanted to turn back. 

After hours of walking and spelunking, Lucretia’s voice finally crackled through their stones, excitedly informing them that the energy source was just up ahead. They rushed down the tunnel ahead of them, their heads starting to spin as they ran, but they pressed onward until at last they were met with something new. The cavern where they’d landed in was a huge, high-ceilinged space, almost perfectly round except for the flat gravel expanse of the floor. The walls were covered in the same massive scratches that Taako had noticed all along the passageways leading down to this space. The walls were lined with sprawling veins of prismatic metal, the very same kind used to make those massive headache-energy towers that littered the surface. The device that perched behind Taako’s ear wasn’t doing a damn thing for him anymore. His ears shrieked, his head pounded, and in the very center of the room, he saw the reason why.

The metal veins that spilled down the walls crept toward the center of the chamber, where they all circled around in a spiral that looked far too neat and deliberate to be natural. In the middle of the floor was a huge sphere that shimmered in the light from Lup and Taako’s stones, made, of course, from the same weird metal they’d been seeing everywhere. The room was deep underground and should have been freezing cold, but as Taako staggered closer to the sphere, the air around him felt dry, warm, and strangely lively, like the whole chamber was full of static electricity. Lup put a hand on his shoulder to tug him back, and she nodded to her stone of far speech. Taako’s ringing tinnitus cleared up just enough for him to hear Lucretia’s voice coming through the stone.

“...the signal. Can you hear me? Lup, Taako, either one of you. Can you hear me? I said we lost...”

“We’re here,” Lup quickly responded, pulling her brother close so they could share her stone. “We’ve come across something really strange down here. How’s it looking on your end?”

“Not great,” Lucretia replied. “We’ve lost the signal.”

Taako’s mouth dropped open in shock, and he saw a look of stunned anger wash over Lup’s face. “What?”

“The signal’s gone,” Lucretia repeated. “There was a huge energy reading right where the sensors say you are now, but as soon as you got close to it, it disappeared. It didn’t move or fade away, just vanished. Like it was never there at all.”

“But... but it can’t just be gone,” Lup rambled. Her grip tightened on her stone. “Did you see where it went? Is there a passageway that maybe we can’t see down here?”

“I don’t think so. I just said that it didn’t move. It just blinked out.”

“That’s impossible.”

“I know it is, but it still happened.”

“No, no, that’s not... it’s not right. It’s supposed to be here!”

“Lup, I don’t know what else to-“

Before she could finish, Lup had dropped her stone in the dirt and started running toward the tangled ball of metal in the center of the room. Taako raced after her, ignoring the staticky sound of Lucretia calling after his sister. Lup’s hands were already encased in fire, and she was angrily slashing at the sphere with gouts of flame spat out from her fingers. The metal screeched like wounded animal as it softened and peeled apart, revealing... nothing.

Lup’s fire had ripped the sphere into messy segments. Chunks of smoldering metal were scattered across the floor, but in the middle of it all was only a circle of soft earth where the orb had been sitting before. It had been hollow, maybe encasing something, but they had no way of knowing that now. Whatever might have been there was gone. Lup stared for a moment at the mess she’d made, her face stony, fingers twitching, then her lip quivered a second before she started to shout.

“God  _ fucking  _ dammit!”

She kicked at the shrapnel, a colorful stream of curses spilling out of her mouth. Taako backed away. There was only one thing to do when she was like this, and that was let her burn herself out. Besides, Lucretia was still trying to reach them through the stones, and someone had to respond to her.

“Hello? Are you two still there?”

Taako crouched down and picked up Lup’s stone. “Yeah, we’re still here.”

“Are you okay? For a second there it sounded like you two were in a war zone.”

“We kind of were. Lup, uh... didn’t take the news too well.”

“Is she okay?”

Taako looked over at his raging sister, who’d finally given up shouting and punching the shrapnel and had sat down in the dirt, her head in her hands. “Yeah, she’s fine. I’ll report back to you when we’re out of here, okay?”

“Got it.”

With that, the stones were quiet, and Taako picked his sister up off the ground. At least their headaches were gone along with the sphere, which was one less thing to have to deal with as they trudged their way back to the surface. Lup was even more sullen now than she’d been on the way down. Near the mouth of the cavern, just before they reached sunlight, Taako finally spoke up. “So... are we gonna talk about that whole scene you made down there?”

“We don’t have to,” Lup tersely replied. “It’s not really worth it.”

“I don’t know if you missed the whole fiery explosion part of it, but it really seems like the kind of thing we should talk about.”

“Why? I was just pissed off that we’d gone all that way for nothing. It was stupid.”

“I don’t think that’s all that this is about.”

Lup stopped in her tracks and turned toward him, a defensive look on her face. She opened her mouth, about to brush him off again, but he beat her to the punch.

“You’ve been acting weird for days now, Lulu.”

She ducked her face away from him and kept on walking. Taako chased after her, unwilling to drop this subject again.

“Why won’t you talk to me? This isn’t like you. It’s starting to freak me out.”

Lup crossed over into the sunlight and Taako followed her until she came to a stop just outside the mouth of the cave. She sank down onto a pile of rocks, her back to the dark tunnel behind them, and stared out across the horizon where the sun had started to sink. He stood in front of his sister, hands on his hips, waiting.

Lup’s ears drooped. She keeled over forwards, dug her hands into her hair and sighed, the cue that she was finally done keeping her silence.

“My period is late.”

There it was. The other shoe, at long last. Taako lowered himself down into the dirt to sit next to her. “For how long?” he asked. “A week or so, right?”

“Almost two,” she mumbled, still keeping her eyes on the ground. “I keep waiting for it, but at this point, I think it just isn’t gonna happen.”

Taako’s face fell as the weight of the news settled onto him. “But you’ve been keeping up with the spell, right?”

“I have. That’s why I don’t understand it. I’ve recast it twice this past week. I’ve done everything right, but nothing is working. And at this point, I just... I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

She blinked, and her eyes looked more wet than before. Taako instinctively reached out and rested a hand on her arm. “I’m so sorry, Lulu. I knew something was up with you, but I had no idea.”

His sister raised her head and looked over at him. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “I didn’t tell anyone because I was still hoping... I thought it was gonna come back, but it never did.”

“We can still try casting it again,” Taako offered. “Maybe if I helped you-“

“I’ve already tried,” Lup cut him off. “Honestly I don’t even know if it’s worth the effort anymore.” She sniffed and rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I think it’s just gone. Everything’s stopped working, and I’m not getting it back.”

Taako sighed, then reached an arm out and pulled his sister close to him. She stayed limp, but she leaned into the hug and closed her eyes. After all the work she’d put into this, just to suddenly lose it all without any warning? Of course she was angry. Of course she hadn’t wanted to talk about it. Taako held her for a minute, rubbing her back, then let her go with a kiss on her forehead. “How about I make you dinner when we get back to the ship? I’m pretty sure lasagna and garlic bread are calling your name.”

Weakly, Lup laughed, and Taako pulled her to her feet. Dinner was exactly what he’d promised, rich comfort food with an extra-sweet dessert, and of course Barry was invited. Lup finally gave up the truth to her boyfriend when the lasagna went into the oven, and he reacted much the same as Taako had; he pulled Lup right into his arms and held her, surely feeling that same ache for her losing out on all her hard work. However, there was something different about the way he reacted to the news. It was subtle. Taako wasn’t sure his sister noticed it, since she was buried deep in a hug at the moment, but if he wasn’t mistaken he could have sworn that Barry looked... worried? Maybe hopeful? There was something in the man’s expression that he couldn’t quite place. He never got the chance to figure out what it was, because it went away as soon as Barry noticed that Taako was staring at him. 

They took dinner into the common room to be a little more comfortable and huddled together on the couch while they sat through the inevitable discussion with the rest of the crew about what they’d found that day. Based on Taako’s descriptions, Davenport guessed that the hollow sphere might have been holding the Light of Creation, and the same force that had put it there had removed it when it sensed Taako and Lup coming down to retrieve it. Lup destroying the metal hub in the cavern was going to put a bit of a damper on things, but there was still plenty worth investigating. Even though they’d lost track of the Light, what they found might have been just as important. The crew decided they’d go back down tomorrow and see what else they could find.

The next morning, where the cave’s entrance had been just a day earlier, the crew found nothing but a smooth face of rock. 

* * *

There was something about this new world that the IPRE crew had missed when they landed, and it had taken them an obscenely long time to notice it. 

After the cave closed and they wasted a day searching for the entrance that no longer existed, the crew started backtracking. They remembered the valley, the plateaus, the forest and river where they’d been before. Lucretia had her sketches of the environment for reference. All the coordinates were right, and that scattered path of metal headache-towers was still there, but the landscape was different. It looked nothing like the place they’d left behind all those weeks ago. The to wide plateaus had split into a series of rolling hills, and the wide, slow river became a sprawling network of narrow streams. The forest was still there, tall and unmoving as ever, but the flat face of rock that they’d scaled was now a slow, gentle incline covered in dense grass and those oversized shrubs. 

It was Merle’s idea to cast a few detection spells and meander around on foot, trying to sort out if there was anything underground that might have been moving the earth, but this place had shown them no magical energy before, so there was no dice to be had with Detect Magic. With the whole area covered with plants, Detect Life was just as pointless; there was hardly a square foot in sight that wasn’t covered with the muddled signals living organic matter. No mysteries were getting solved today; all they had left to do was board the ship again and keep searching for the Light of Creation.

It had been a week since Lup’s blowout in the disappearing cave. The crew was back to business as usual, venturing out and fucking around in the landscape until someone found something worth noting. The Starblaster had landed in a particularly rocky patch, and Taako had been grouped together with Magnus for the day, plus Lup coming along for the ride. She’d been awake before him that morning- a huge shock, considering their recent track record- and if she’d eaten breakfast, he hadn’t seen it happen. She had jammed as many energy bars into her pockets as she could fit, and as soon as they were out of sight of the ship, she’d ripped into them and started munching. Weirdly enough, though, she didn’t seem particularly hungry. She fell into a pattern of opening one up, taking a bite or two, then closing it again and stowing it away, rinse and repeat about every ten minutes.

Magnus picked a spot in the shade of a few of those big soft non-trees when they stopped for lunch, a little ways away from the winding path of a stream. Taako kept an eye on Lup all through the short break; she seemed to be eating normally enough, but once she got to the second half of the sandwich he’d packed her, she seemed to be having a hard time swallowing it. She finished it anyway, then kicked her boots off and ran to the stream to dip her feet. Taako asked their third party if he’d noticed anything  _ off _ about his sister, and Magnus only shrugged in response. Either he hadn’t noticed, or he had and didn’t know what to make of it.

It wasn’t until an hour later, while they were following the stream across the uneven ground, that Lup finally spoke up.

“Holy fuck, it’s hot out here.”

Taako glanced back at her. She’d been lagging behind them all day, but something now had made her especially sluggish. The afternoon sun was bright and obnoxious, beating down on them like spotlights, but the air itself felt reasonably cool to Taako. There was even a slight breeze. Lup, on the other hand, had her jacket around her waist and was wheezing for breath with every step she took.

“Is it?” Magnus asked. “I’m feeling okay. What about you, Taako?”

“I’m fine,” he said, and he generally was, but the more he looked at Lup, the less true that statement became. 

“Are you sure? Because I’m like... dying out here,” Lup huffed. At that point, both Taako and Magnus had stopped. Lup’s steps were unsteady as she stumbled across the rocks to catch up with them. Once he saw her up close, despite frantically trying to cool herself, Taako could see that she wasn’t sweating. “You don’t look so good,” he said. 

“Should we stop?” Magnus offered. “We don’t have to keep going if-“

“No, no, I can still walk,” she panted. “I just... I think I need a few...” The rest of her words got lost and a gag rose up in the back of her throat. A hand flew up to cover her mouth, and right away alarm bells started ringing in Taako’s head.

“Okay, okay, easy there.” He took a step, reached out, tried to hold her upright. She swayed on her feet and choked again, then held her arm out, looked Taako dead in the eyes and frantically shook her head.  _ Stand back _ .

He didn’t. He ran to her side and helped her lean against a rock, and a second later she’d pitched forward, made one more ugly, guttural noise before vomit came spilling out of her mouth. Once it started, it wouldn’t stop; she kept coughing, puking, gasping for air then puking more. Magnus watched them both, pale with shock, while Taako held on tight to his sister to keep her from falling over headfirst into the stream. When it finally ended, Lup was shivering, her face red, and both her shoes and Taako’s were covered in vomit. Carefully, Taako eased his sister away from the sticky pool of half-digested sandwich and sat her down on the edge of the stream with her feet in the water. Magnus offered her his water skin, and she gladly took it. She spat the first mouthful out, then took a few hungry gulps of water before she suddenly pulled back, struggling not to start gagging again.

“Alright, that does it,” Magnus said decisively, taking the skin from her shaky hand. “Once you’re able to stand, we’re heading back.”

Lup looked up at him, seeming confused. “What? Why?”

“Why? You just puked your guts out!”

“It wasn’t that bad. I can keep going.”

“Look, we’ll just explain the situation to Captain-port when we get back to the ship. Then when Merle comes back he can work on helping you get better.”

“But the Light...”

“Wherever it is, I don’t think we’re going to find it today,” Taako cut in. “The day’s halfway over already, and we’ve seen no sign of it anywhere.”

His sister looked at him, face lined with disappointment, but she said nothing, only nodded in silent agreement. Magnus gave her the water skin for a few more careful sips. They sat together at the water’s edge for a short while, waiting for Lup’s nausea to calm down, then turned around and headed back to the ship when it finally did. Magnus had to pick her up and carry her on his back after the halfway point, after she suddenly started feeling faint. When he set her down again, it was on a cot in the sickbay. Taako assigned himself the task of looking after his sister, letting Magnus go to the bridge and send a report to the captain. 

Taako left the room briefly to get a glass of water for her. Food was off the table for the moment, but he knew she’d have to eat something eventually. The remaining energy bars left out on the table by the cot told him she knew that as well. While he’d been gone, she had found a blanket in a linen closet somewhere and wrapped herself tightly in it, now lying on her side and looking like a tired and incredibly messy crescent roll. Taako climbed onto the cot next to her. “What happened to feeling hot?”

Under the blanket, Lup shrugged. “Don’t know. Think it was just a side effect of being about to hurl. I started feeling cold as soon as we got back.”

“You might be coming down with something,” Taako mused, feeling her fever-less forehead again. “I noticed you were being weird again this morning.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t gonna bring it up,” his sister confessed. “I’ve been feeling gross after waking up for the past few days.”

“Days?!”

“It was never this bad until now. I was always able to sit through it. Today’s the first time that I actually threw up because of it.”

Taako took a breath, trying to find the right words to lecture his sister with, but he came up empty. He just shook his head and sighed. “Well, Merle can try and fix you up when he comes back. Hopefully you won’t have to deal with this much longer.”

“That would be great. Though it would be better if I knew how I’d ended up like this in the first place. If it was a virus or something, somebody else would have gotten it too. Probably you, or Barry.”

“My money would be on Barry, with how often I see you two sucking face.”

Lup groaned, her face pink with an embarrassed smile. “ _ Gross _ , Taako.”

“Hey. I just talk about it. You’re the one who actually does it. And at least this time I didn’t bring up the amount of noise you idiots make on the other side of my bedroom wall.”

Neither of them could help laughing at that. Lup settled comfortably into the blanket, and Taako instinctually cuddled up next to her, immediately forgetting the suggestions they’d just been making about contagious stomach bugs. He’d caught things from her before, and he’d gladly do it again, if it meant making her feel better. She fell asleep before long, exhausted by every last bit of the day she’d had, and after a few hours had whiled away and the sun sank toward the horizon, the other half of the crew finally returned.

Taako sensed tension right away. Merle, Barry and Davenport boarded the ship in a hurry, all of them panting and damp with sweat; they looked like they’d run the whole way back to the Starblaster, and the sight of them set Taako’s nerves on edge. The last time he’d seen them in this state, something had been chasing them. In the next few minutes of their collective rambling, Taako gathered that they had come across one of the towers again, and Davenport had gotten the bright idea to climb into its twisted stems and maybe figure out what the massive structure was connected to, where it got its power from, anything at all that might help them understand them and what purpose they served. The base was buried in the earth, so Merle and Barry had started digging to see just how deep its roots went. They’d gone down to around ten feet when the structure had suddenly begun to wrench itself apart. 

It had screamed, so Barry described, as it tore itself down. The noise it made as its stems pulled apart was the most horrific sound he’d ever heard in his life. His ears were still ringing, even hours after he and the others had run away from the noise. It was probably a bad time to tell him that his girlfriend had suddenly fallen ill, but Taako told him anyway. Their cleric was right there, and his sister needed healing  _ real _ badly.

At his insistence, Merle held off on smoking his migraine back into submission in favor of checking up on Lup, but an hour later, the dwarf showed up in the kitchen with a tired look on his face and nothing new to report. Lup wasn’t running a fever, didn’t have any muscle fatigue, and her coordination seemed to be right back to where it should be. If it was a virus, it must have already passed. Might have been neurological, Merle suggested; this world was doing weird things to all of them.

Nothing about this was sitting right with Taako. Barry seemed to be on the same page as him. They both spent the rest of the evening in Lup’s room, keeping her company, then watching over her after she passed out sometime near ten PM. He had that look on his face again, the same one Taako had noticed when Lup had told him her period had disappeared. 

“Penny for your thoughts,” he said.

“I’d gladly take it if I knew what the hell they were,” Barry quietly responded. He looked down at Lup, curled up beside him with her head resting in his lap. “I just hope she’s okay. She’s been going through a lot in this cycle.”

“She really has.”

“Something is just...  _ off _ about all of this.”

Taako looked at him, ears perked. “You’re getting that too?”

“Yeah. I mean, we get sick during cycles all the time. Hell, we  _ die  _ during cycles, and that’s all just a part of the mission. There’s just something weird about this time. I can’t put a name to it, but I know it’s there.” He gently stroked a hand over his girlfriend’s hair. “You know what I’m talking about?”

He nodded. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. I just thought it would be weird of me to talk about it out loud. It doesn’t feel totally real, like this is all in my head or something. It feels better to know it’s not just me.”

“Do you think she gets it too?”

Taako looked down at his sleeping sister. “I think she does,” he said. “That’s probably why she hasn’t talked about it.”

“Do you think she’s...”

He waited for Barry to finish, but the sentence just trailed off into a dead end. The man seemed focused intently on Lup, his fingers tangled in her hair, that weird worried/hopeful look never leaving his face.

“That she’s what?” Taako pressed, nudging Barry’s leg with his foot.

Just like that, Barry snapped out of it and shook his head. “Nothing. Never mind.”

_ Predictable _ , Taako thought to himself. Now Barry was acting just like Lup; weird, cagey, terrible at hiding the fact that something was bothering him but still unwilling to talk about it. He sighed and got up from the bed to stretch. “I think I’m gonna turn in,” he said. “If she wakes up puking, let me know, got it?”

“Noted.”

“Thanks.” Taako smiled at Barry over his shoulder before stepping out into the hallway and ducking into his own room for the night.

* * *

According to Barry, Lup was fine the next morning. Then she wasn’t. Then she was again, and Taako kept a close eye on his sister for the whole next week as the sickness came and went, showing no consistency or signs of stopping. Some days it was mild, and she managed to keep breakfast down and get through the day without a hitch. On others, it struck late, hitting her without warning in the afternoon or right before dinner. Then there were the mornings that were even worse than when her menstrual cramps kept her from crawling out of bed. 

Davenport had temporarily put her on hold from venturing off the ship, so most days she was the one left onboard to keep track of everyone else. Taako could occasionally barter with the captain to let him or Barry stay with her. They were only ever allowed to stay one at a time, though, since it was still preferable to have as many eyes out for the Light of Creation as possible.

It was one of the worst mornings that Taako had managed to skip out on going out for the day in favor of staying with Lup. She’d slept late, feeling too sick to do much else. Taako had been in the bathroom, messing with his hair in the mirror when Lup, who up until then had been sleeping, suddenly bolted through the door and shoved past him, made a beeline for the toilet and sank to her knees in front of it. 

“Wow. Not even gonna knock, huh? I could have been naked.”

She didn’t answer, too busy retching and coughing up every last bit of what she’d eaten the night before. The stream of vomit took forever to reach its end, and when it finally did, Lup fell back and slumped over against the opposite wall. Taako turned around to face her, about to make another quip at her condition, but one look at her stole the words right out of his mouth. 

She looked much like she had when he’d found her curled up in bed, wracked with cramps; doubled over, shivering and clutching her stomach. Taako sank down on his knees to get a better look at her. “Lulu?”

His sister couldn’t form words to reply. The second she opened her mouth, she choked again, and he lunged forward just fast enough to grab her hair and hold it back while she threw up again. 

“Son of a bitch,” Taako breathed when it was over. 

Lup took a minute to catch her breath, then whimpered. “It’s really bad today.”

“Looks like it. What’s going on? Just the nausea, or-“

His sister winced, and he fell silent, watching her face scrunch up into a mask of pain. Her fingers tightened on the fabric of her shirt, then relaxed. She flattened her hands over her lower abdomen and rubbed her fingers in small, gentle circles. “Something hurts. I don’t know what, or where it’s coming from,” she huffed. “It’s like when I had cramps, but it can’t be cramps. It’s just.... bad.”

As soon as her words settled in his ears, suspicion welled up in Taako. A thought had come to him, and once it did, he felt like an idiot for not thinking it sooner. Before another second was wasted, he was leaning over Lup and casting Detect Life.

The ship was cold, for the most part. Everyone else was gone for the day. The only signs of life within the steel hulls of the Starblaster were in the room with Taako, within himself and right in front of him. The quiet only amplified what he saw. In his own chest, he felt the velvety, shimmering glow of living warmth that he knew to be his own. He’d cast this spell a million times before, and he knew that Lup’s aura should have been a near-perfect replica of his, only burning a little bit hotter. What he found in front of him was a far cry from what he was used to seeing; it was almost her, but it was blurry and indistinct, something else mixed in with it. More than one signal was glowing simultaneously, each one fighting the other for recognition, like the static on a radio caught between stations. Taako’s heart skipped a beat, and he quickly put a hand on his sister’s shoulder and stared into her eyes.

“Lup, you need to cast Detect Life. Right now.”

She gazed back at him, too tired to be startled, but looking about as close as she could get to it. “Why?”

“No questions. Please. Just do it.”

Lup’s aura shivered as she dragged the energy out of herself to cast the spell, and Taako turned off his own spell and waited. He watched as Lup’s eyes squinted in focus, then widened. She looked up at her brother, then down at herself, then back to him. Her hands were trembling. She raised one and reached out to him, hovering her fingertips over his chest as if she needed to be sure he was real. A small gasp escaped her lips, and her hands came back to center, resting on her stomach again.

“You felt it too,” Taako said quietly. “Didn’t you?”

Weakly, Lup nodded. “I... I can’t believe it.”

“But it’s there. It’s been there this whole time. We just... oh, fuck, how come we didn’t figure this out sooner?”

“I don’t know,” his sister mumbled. Her voice wavered, quiet and unsure, as she stared down at where she’d placed her hands. “I really don’t know.”

Lup had two living signals coming from her at once. It had been fuzzy when Taako had read it, the new signal inseparable from his sister’s, but he knew she had to have found it as well. It would stand out from her, in her own eyes; there was no mistaking a separate signal from her own. He hadn’t felt it, but he could imagine it: a bright and powerful presence, small like a tea light but flickering all the same, nestled in the space underneath his sister’s hands. There was something else alive inside of Lup’s body, and suddenly the past few weeks made a lot more sense.

Lup’s spell hadn’t worn off after all. She was pregnant.

* * *

“What the hell are we supposed to do now?”

An hour later they had moved to Taako’s room. Lup sat huddled under a blanket on his bed, a steaming cup of Merle’s nausea remedy tea in her hands. Taako glanced at her every few seconds as he paced around the small space, furiously twisting his fingers around strands of his hair while he tried to think.

“Maybe we can start with you sitting down,” Lup suggested. 

Her brother turned to her and scoffed. “Listen, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we now have a baby on our hands. A fucking  _ baby _ , Lup. In the middle of everything else.”

“I know. If I had the energy to be running around in circles, I would be, but I just spent the whole morning on the bathroom floor, spewing my guts out, and watching you freak out even harder about this than I physically can is not helping me feel any better.”

Taako finally caved, returning to bed and scooting into place next to his sister. “I’m sorry,” he sighed. “This is all so sudden.”

“You’re telling me,” Lup huffed. “I’m the one who’s actually pregnant here.”

“I guess all this means is that your spell worked a little  _ too _ well.”

She nodded. “At least I know I didn’t lose my period because I suddenly couldn’t do magic right anymore. Although if I’d just miscast the spell, we wouldn’t have to deal with... well, all of  _ this _ .”

Again, Taako had to ask. “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know yet,” Lup admitted. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around it, honestly. It’s just... I feel like I’m dreaming. This is something that I never thought might happen to me. But I saw it. I felt it. You did too. We both know it’s there.”

“How long do you think it’s been?”

“I have no idea. At least since I lost my period, which was about a month ago, but it was probably there even longer than that. It must have happened sometime between the two, so...” A quiet second passed as she counted the weeks in her head. “Eight weeks? Maybe nine, or ten...” She sighed and let her forehead fall onto her knees. “I don’t even know. I just feel like an idiot for not realizing what was going on until now.”

“I’m on the same boat with you on that one,” Taako agreed. 

For a while, neither of them had it in themselves to speak. They were both so lost, it seemed like there was nothing to be said. Taako stayed put and watched his sister while she took a few careful sips from the mug in her hands, hoping she wouldn’t start throwing up again. Eventually, she spoke.

“I have to tell Barry.”

Taako raised an eyebrow. “You sure that’s a good idea?”

“I can’t think of anything better,” Lup confessed. “All this time I’ve been trying to figure out what to do next, but it feels like there’s nothing else. Every time I try to think of a plan or something, it always comes back to him.”

It wasn’t a bad move, Taako figured, and he was only being apprehensive because everything about him was wound tight at the moment. Trying to relax, he leaned his head onto his sister’s shoulder and took a deep breath. “How do you think he’s gonna react?” he quietly asked.

“I don’t know. It just feels like the right next step to take. I know that the baby is his. It can’t be anyone else’s but his.” She paused, then added, “I think he might already know, anyway.”

“Really?”

“He  _ might _ ,” Lup specified. “I don’t know if he actually does. He’s been different around me lately. Kind of like you, but turned up to eleven. He’s checking in on me all the time, always asking me if I need anything. Unless Davenport splits us up, he’s never not in the same room as me. And he’s been really gentle whenever we-“

“Lup.  _ Gross _ .”

“Hey. How the fuck do you think he put a baby into me in the first place?”

“Alright. Whatever. So we tell him... and then what?”

“No idea. At this point, I’m just gonna cross that bridge when I get to it.”

A few hours later, the bridge was reached, and both Taako and Lup passed right on by it without crossing a damn thing.

Barry came back from another fruitless investigation, along with the rest of the crew who’d gone out with him. They’d found another cavern like the one Lup and Taako had descended into, and this time had decided to bring back a few samples of the metal veins. Cutting into them had caused the sphere in the center of the chamber to unravel, and from then on it had been a mad dash to the exit before the cave finally collapsed in on itself. They’d all barely made it out alive, and the second Barry laid eyes on Lup, he was drawn to her like a magnet, taking her into his arms and asking question after question, spilling concern all over her as if he hadn’t almost died earlier that day.

It would have been a great time to give him the news. Lup could have just snuck him away for a minute and told him everything in some place where the rest of the crew wouldn’t hear them. Except she didn’t, and then the opportunity got lost when the crew unanimously decided that it was time for dinner and everyone headed to the kitchen. After all that was over, Merle and Lucretia disappeared to the lab to look over the samples, and Magnus had gone off with Davenport to settle a game of poker they’d left unfinished. Another opportunity came up while Taako and Barry were left to do the dishes, Lup sitting at the table only a few feet away. Yet no matter how many urgent glances he and his sister shot at one another, neither of them managed to spit out the news of what they’d found out that day.

Taako went to bed embarrassed that he’d said nothing, but still nervous about what would happen when the truth finally came out. Barry would most likely be sleeping in Lup’s room. He hoped she’d tell him then. But when he greeted Barry in the kitchen the next morning and the subject of Lup and the baby never came up, he knew she hadn’t said anything. 

The responsibility kept getting passed back and forth between them for the entire next day. It felt like a stupid thing to be dodging, and every time Taako dropped the ball and missed a chance to tell Barry, he felt even stupider. How hard could it possibly be? It was only a few words.  _ Hey, Barry, you got my sister pregnant. Just figured you should know. _

It was so much easier said than done. No time ever felt like the right one. The bomb always seemed so much bigger when he was about to drop it, and even if Barry already knew, was that going to make things any better? Was it helping Lup? He had no idea, and every time he conveniently forgot to give Barry the news, he got further away from finding out. No matter how he tried, Taako couldn’t work up the courage to tell him what had happened, and apparently, neither could Lup.

He couldn’t push her to hurry up and tell her boyfriend right now. He cared about her too much to do that. Besides, she had enough to deal with at the moment, now that her body had gone off on its own and started fucking around in ways she hadn’t anticipated.

The day after their discovery, the Starblaster was on the move again, and once landed the crew had new territory to explore. After tearing down another of the metal structures while collecting more samples (their tests had found that they contained nothing but metal, and couldn’t have been attached to anything organic), they managed to catch a blip of something in the ship’s sensors before it was covered up again. There was little proof behind it, but all of them jumped to the same conclusion at once: the Light of Creation was somewhere nearby, and maybe, after all this time, they might actually be able to get their hands on it.

The Starblaster had landed at the edge of a steep, rocky canyon this time around, with veins of metal lining one side of the walls. Taako was sent down to investigate it, along with Lup, Barry and Magnus. Merle and Lucretia would be staying topside, trying to muddy the energy of the surrounding metal veins and get Davenport a clearer signal on the ship’s sensors. They kept their stones of far speech on hand at all times, staying in constant contact with the rest of the crew while they ventured into the earthen crevasse in search of the Light.

They’d been walking for ages. There were no metal towers to be seen in the gap between greenery, so all heads remained clear, but without the ship’s sensors to guide them on foot, they were searching blind.

“How’s it looking up there?” Barry asked as they rounded another corner and reached a split in the path.

“Not great,” Merle replied through the stone in his hand. “Davenport said the signal keeps moving. The closer you get to it, the closer it moves to the edge of our range. We’re probably going to have to move to keep up with you.”

“Any idea how deep it is?” Magnus asked. “Is it in the canyon, or underground, or what?”

“The captain’s pretty sure it’s in the canyon with you. It hasn’t changed its course yet,” Lucretia replied. “We’ll warn you if it does, but we’re losing it already. We need to pick up and follow it.”

“Okay,” Barry agreed. “Just tell Captain-port not to stay in the air too long. We’ve gone this far searching for the Light, and we don’t want to lose it again.”

“I’ll let him know.”

With that, their stones went silent, and the group kept on walking. Taako caught up to his sister, whose morning sickness had temporarily calmed down by some goddamn miracle and let her come out to investigate with them. They walked side by side in silence for a minute, then without warning, Lup reached for his hand and grabbed it. He glanced over at her, worried until he noticed the determined look on her face. She flicked her eyes at Barry, then back at him. “Tonight,” she whispered. “We have to get it over with.”

She didn’t need to elaborate. Taako understood. He nodded, and their path was interrupted by a crackle from their stones. 

“Hey, guys?” Merle’s voice called to them. “Guys, stop walking. We’re starting to lose your signal, too.”

Worry returned to the forefront of Taako’s emotions. He grasped his stone of far speech and responded. “What’s going on?”

“We haven’t gotten control of the towers in the new area yet,” Lucretia replied. “They’re screwing with the eye we have on you. You need to stop for a bit so we can catch up.”

“Got it,” Taako said, not wasting a second before setting himself down on the canyon floor and brushing the sweat from his forehead. “I’m fucking tired. We went all this way, and all we managed to do was almost lose the signal again. This shit is getting really old, really fast.”

“Gotta agree with you there, buddy,” Magnus replied. He set his traveling pack down and leaned back against the canyon wall. “It’s been almost half a cycle now. If we don’t find the Light soon...”

“At least this world doesn’t have anyone living in it,” Lup chimed in. “If the Hunger tears a hole in this place, nobody’s going to be any worse off.”

“But if it’s uninhabited, that wouldn’t explain all the big metal trees we keep seeing everywhere,” Magnus pointed out.

“The results from that have been weird as it is,” Barry added. “We’ve been studying those samples we took for days, and none of our findings make sense.”

“What have you been finding, anyway?” Taako asked. “I’ve been wondering about that.

“I was hoping someone was going to ask me eventually.” Barry leaned up against the wall across from Magnus, his shoulder nudging against one of those metal veins. “You see, it’s not an organic material. It’s definitely metal. But the way it responds to the tests we’ve performed-“

The rest of his words disappeared as a loud groan split the air. It was shrill, screeching but still low and deep, like the painful noises of a great metal ship being torn apart; it was almost felt more than heard, reverberating through Taako’s bones. His ears twitched downward, his hands flew up and clasped over them, trying to block out the sound, but it pierced right through. It was everywhere, all around them, mind-numbingly loud, and there seemed to be no escape. He hardly noticed that his stone of far speech was crackling again. Merle’s voice was still talking to him from his pocket, trying to tell him something, but he could only pick up a few words.

“Finally....good news. We... get ahold of... tower, and-“

“Merle?” Taako snatched the stone in his hand and his voice tumbled out of his mouth, tight with panic. “Merle, whatever you’re doing up there, you need to stop!”

“What?” Lucretia’s voice cut through. “We can’t stop. We’ve finally got a signal from the Light.”

Under his feet, the ground started to shake. Barry backed away from the wall, and Lup grabbed his arm, clinging tight. Her free hand quickly found Taako’s. Magnus was shouting into his stone of far speech, begging his friends to stop messing with the tower, and Taako couldn’t hear their replies. The groan had started up again, and in front of them all, where Barry had been leaning only a few seconds ago, the rock split open. A black rift appeared along the line of the great metal vein that Barry had touched, the edges peeling slowly apart, growing wide and round as the rock around it furrowed like folds of thick, leathery skin. Taako’s fingers shook as he clutched his sister’s hand and stared into the gaping black void, a dark chasm large enough to swallow him whole.

No, wait. Not a chasm. An eye.

The edges of rock unfolded and met again before bouncing back open. It had blinked, and the massive black pupil pulled tight with a muddy grey iris and stared out, taking in all four of them at once. The canyon trembled as another groan ripped through it, and the walls shifted, one side sliding down as the other rose up from the earth. Taako understood what it was now; the roar of a living creature, slow and drowsy, but big. Unimaginably big, and now, thanks to them,  _ pissed the fuck off _ .

Taako held his stone of far speech to his mouth and shouted at his friends, “Stop fucking with the trees and get us out of here! Now!”

Between the grinding noise of rock and the earsplitting moans of the enormous thing they’d just woken up, there was no space to hear the reply that came through his stone. He was suddenly losing his balance, and he held on tight to Lup, not knowing what else he could do. The ground was falling away under them, tilting to one side. It was only a few seconds before Magnus slipped and went skidding down the slope of crumbling gravel that the canyon floor had become. Taako tried to cast a Mage Hand to stop him, but just as suddenly the fighter was caught in the craggy surface of the rising wall and whisked out of the spell’s range. Taako shouted his name after him, no purpose behind it, nor any hope that he’d hear it, just screamed out of desperate confusion. As his eyes drew upward, he saw the dark shape of the Starblaster silhouetted against the sun, getting smaller and smaller as the ground continued to sink. It had never felt so far away.

Absently, Taako felt a tug on his arm. He looked behind him to see Barry clinging to his wrist, trying to pull him somewhere. His mouth moved, and Taako could hear a few distant snippets of his voice, but nowhere near enough to make out what he said. He pulled again, pointed upwards, and at last he understood.  _ Run toward the top of the slope _ . Lup was already making her way there, clinging to Barry, trying to drag the two of them along with her.

The ground was like a treadmill under their feet, slipping away further with every passing second, and still they tried to outrun it. It was all Taako could do not to topple over and get caught in the shifting sea of rocks like Magnus. There was nothing to hold onto, nothing to reach for, just a desperate bid to get  _ up _ , wherever that even was anymore. The earth roiled like water, like a living,  _ breathing _ thing, threatening with every heave to suddenly collapse and close in on all of them.

Then a rush of wind. Sunlight. The ground tilting underneath them again. Up became down, and they were slipping, falling, then landing on grass that was closer than it should have been. What had been a canyon before had broken open and become a flat face of rocky soil, and the walls had consolidated into something large and solid. Taako could barely make out the shape of what might have been limbs, maybe a head somewhere near the top. All his focus was interrupted by the familiar hum of the bond engine.

The Starblaster was swooping down towards them, bay door open. He could see Merle peeking around the edge, hanging onto the frame, and Magnus beside him.  _ Magnus is okay _ . Taako barely had time to breathe a sigh of relief. They were losing their footing, and his friends were trying to swing a length of rope toward them. Taako reached out to grab it. Woven nylon struck his palms, his feet lifted off the ground and he glanced back to see Lup, hand outstretched, reaching for him. He inched up the rope and held his arm out in return as he swung back towards her and Barry. Her hands found his arm, his free hand blindly grasped at whatever part of her he could hold onto, and when the Starblaster chugged to pull them back, he was sure Barry would come with her. Then came the loud scrape of rock against rock, and he heard his sister scream.

The ground had changed its direction; it was sliding sideways again, and Barry had fallen. She’d tried to cast something towards him, but too quickly he had left the range of anything useful. Taako felt a pull on the rope. Magnus was towing them back in.

“What the hell are you doing?” Taako shouted up at him. “Barry’s still down there!” But with one glance up, he quickly understood. All the layers of rock, metal and soil that had risen up were starting to come down again. The whole landscape was being turned over, and the Starblaster was caught in the middle of it.

The ship dodged and wove between the sweeping walls of stone, trying to find its way out. The rope swung freely underneath the hull, Taako and Lup with it. Momentum slammed his back into a solid face of rock that hadn’t been there ten seconds ago. The air left his lungs and he could have sworn he heard something crunch, but he still clung to both Lup and the rope for dear life, unwilling to let either one go.

Rising from the collapsing earth felt like fastest eternity Taako had ever lived through, and he spent every second of it wheezing, eyes squeezed shut and hands sore with a white-knuckled grasp on the one thing that kept him from falling into the rocky hell below. Then there were hands around his arms, pulling him loose from the rope; dry ones, with thick fingers and short nails that smelled distinctly like dirt. He cracked his eyes open and saw Merle leaning over him, waving a hand in front of his face. 

“Hey, you alright there? You got hit pretty hard.”

Taako coughed; his lungs were doing a rough job of re-inflating. “I’m fine,” he croaked. His arms were numb, but Taako still leaned back on them and pushed himself upright to look around. He’d made it out just fine, but that wasn’t important anymore. He had to know that Lup was okay.

She was, or at least as much as she could be. She was alive, and currently being bear-hugged by Magnus, who had anchored himself to a handrail and was now frantically trying to hold Lup still. Taako’s heart sank. She was barely strong enough to fight him, weak, tired and dusty but still struggling to get back to the open bay door. He heard her calling out Barry’s name, then her voice was lost in the deafening grind of rock collapsing in on itself. His sister sank down to her knees, Magnus still holding her.

Lucretia hit a button, and the bay door slid closed. 

* * *

Taako saw it through the plexiglass windows of the bridge as the Starblaster sped away from that canyon, away from Barry, away from the living ground that had consumed him and everything else that had happened that day.

It looked like a mountain at first glance, oddly shaped and craggy on only one side, but couldn’t have been a mountain, given the fact that it moved. Taako picked out more and more details as he stared: two long projections that planted into the ground like limbs, an arched curve like a huge grassy hill, a rocky peak that looked unsettlingly like a reptilian face. And that eye; wide, piercing and feral, like a hare’s eye but a million times bigger. He could see it, even from this distance, staring out at them and watching them leave. The mountain then pulled its projections up from the ground and plodded at a snail’s pace away from the site of their failed investigation.

They had made a mistake thinking this plane was uninhabited. There were things that lived here, but they were massive and slow, so much so that nobody in the crew had known they were living things at all. Captain Davenport informed them that they’d be in the air for the next few days until they found a safe place to land, hopefully somewhere clear of those metal towers where the land they walked on wouldn’t suddenly wake up and try to kill them. The second he dismissed the crew, Lup disappeared into her room.

Taako let her go. She’d want time to herself at first, to work out the worst of everything. He gave it an hour, just long enough to fix them both something to eat. Once he’d fixed up a plate of her favorite baked macaroni and cheese, he went ahead and walked into her room without knocking. 

He found her lying on her side, curled up with her back to the door. Taako quietly made his way in and set his tray on her bedside table, then sat down on the bed next to her. He reached out to place his hand on her shoulder. She sighed, and her breath shuddered as it came out. 

“This really sucks, huh?” he said softly.

“Yeah.” Lup’s reply came out weak and gravelly, like she’d forced it out through a throat that was too tight to be speaking.

“How are you holding up?”

“Bad.”

He hadn’t really needed to ask. He’d been able to tell from the second he walked into the room, but Lup needed to hear  _ someone _ ask her how she felt.

Taako had walked Lup through grieving for Barry before. Death was never permanent in the cycles anyway; they both knew he’d be back eventually, that they could start fresh with the possibility that maybe, this time, it might be different and everything could turn out okay. This wasn’t anything like the previous cycles, though; things had gotten complicated, and this time, Barry’s death meant so much more.

He scooted himself back against the pillows, intending to get a better look at his sister. She didn’t move, and when he leaned over to get a look at her face, her eyes were glassy and red, her face stained with the half-dried remains of tears. Who knew how long she’d been crying before he had come in to check on her, or how long it had taken her to calm down again? Worse yet, when he looked down, Taako saw his sister’s hands were cradling her stomach. He’d never seen her look so small and scared. She must have felt the baby’s presence now more than ever.

He felt a cold, dark chasm opening up in his heart, a lot like the eye in the canyon. “Lulu...”

“You don’t have to say anything,” Lup choked out. “I mean... what is there to say? He’s gone. We’re stuck.”

He wasn’t totally sure which  _ we _ she was referring to; the two of them, or her and the baby. Maybe all three of them at once. Taako sure as hell wasn’t about to ask. He lowered himself down and snuggled up next to her, wrapping his free arm around her shoulders to hug her close. She nestled herself against him, the same way she did whenever they’d had to share a bed as kids.

“You’re gonna be okay,” he whispered into her hair. 

“Am I?”

“You usually are. We both know he’s going to come back.”

“But he isn’t here  _ now _ ,” Lup cut in. “When I really,  _ really _ fucking need him.” Her body shivered, and Taako heard her sniffle. “Why couldn’t I just get my shit together and tell him?”

“I should be asking myself the same question.” A pause, which lasted until Taako realized Lup wasn’t going to respond to him. “Even if he knew, we don’t know that it would have changed anything.”

“He might have tried a little harder to stay alive.”

“But he also might have ended up dying while trying to keep you safe.” Lup glanced over her shoulder at him, so he elaborated. “I think he would have, anyway.”

With a sigh, Lup rolled back over and closed her eyes. “I just wish he was still here. If I still had him with me, I wouldn’t feel like this.”

_ This _ . Empty, lost, confused, longing for something that could no longer be had. Taako was familiar with it;  _ this _ was the feeling that had hit him in every cycle where he’d seen Lup die. He had never become numb to it, not when it came to her. But the  _ this _ that Lup felt had to be so much worse. Barry was gone, but he’d left a piece of himself behind, one that Lup was now forced to carry until further notice. It was a small burden, but Taako couldn’t imagine how heavy it was.

They needed a game plan for the rest of this endeavor, but now wasn’t the time to make one. Any decisions were Lup’s to make anyway, so Taako didn’t bother her with more questions. She might have felt alone, but that didn’t mean that Taako couldn’t do all he could to fix that. Silently, he kissed the top of his sister’s head and hugged her tightly to his chest, letting the waves of grief wash over them both.

It was nearly a whole week before Davenport found a safe place to land. Since the day they’d disturbed that gargantuan mountain of creature, dozens more were waking up and making themselves known. There was no telling how many there were in this world, but nearly everywhere the crew went, the ground looked like it was breathing below the ship. Fields of grass and mounds of rock weren’t what they had seemed at first glance. 

They ended up back in that forest of oversized trees where they had first landed. The long, flat face of rock was back and appeared to, for once, actually be nothing more than that. The oversized trees were made of wood, not the weird soft shrubbery material that defined whatever grew from the backs of those gigantic land-beasts. The Starblaster touched down a short distance from a wandering stream that wove a calm, narrow path through the woods, and it was determined then that the crew would be best off taking a break and lying low until the situation with the giant creatures outside had calmed the fuck down. 

Taako stayed quiet on the matter of Lup and the baby, or at least as much as he could. No amount of mandatory slacking off would prevent her morning sickness from coming back. At least, for the moment, the Light of Creation wasn’t so high on their list of priorities anymore, so she wasn’t missing much when she spent entire mornings, afternoons and evenings holed up in the bathroom.

While they kept their silence in front of the rest of the crew, the subject of the baby stayed out of their conversations. Even when Lup was throwing up and crying at the same time, and even though they knew exactly why she was the way she’d been lately, they didn’t mention it out loud. Still, though it wasn’t being talked about, Taako knew that it was weighing on both their minds. Once in a while, when she thought no one was paying attention, Taako would catch his sister absent-mindedly resting a hand on her belly. Exactly what she was thinking, not even he could tell, but he knew that one thing was probably hanging in the back of her mind. Sooner or later, they’d have to talk about how to move forward.

One morning, the vicious cycle of Lup’s morning sickness finally lulled, and Taako found her packing up for a day-long hike into the woods. Being stuck on the ship for so long was making all of them go a little stir-crazy, and it only made sense that she'd want some time on her own. Taako was ready to let her go all by herself until she invited him to come along at the last minute.

Taako picked up on her insinuations that maybe, just maybe, this could finally be the opportunity they needed to talk things over. He got dressed in a hurry, scraped his hair into a messy braid and set out alongside her. The first few hours of their hike were quiet. Lup didn’t talk much, seemingly much more focused on putting as much distance between herself and the ship as possible. Taako didn’t have much to say in return. They made their way along the streambed together until it branched out into a small pool where Lup decided to kick her shoes off and dip her feet into the water.

“So,” she said. 

“So,” Taako echoed back to her. “Is it time to talk about it now, or...”

“It’s the whole reason I asked you to come out here,” Lup replied. “I don’t know what it is about being stuck on the ship with everyone else. I’ve felt so paranoid lately. I can’t talk about it when I feel like everyone is listening.”

He nodded in agreement. “This on top of everything else would be a lot for them to suddenly comprehend all at once.”

“I don’t know how Lucretia would take it, either. She’s part of the reason I could even end up like this at all.”

“We can’t just keep it covered up forever.”

“I didn’t think we could. And we shouldn’t have to.” She bit down on her lip and had to draw in a breath before she spoke again. “The easiest thing would probably be to just stop all of this before it goes any further.”

“So... abortion?”

Lup nodded, keeping her eyes on the water and refusing to look at Taako. “It’s what makes the most sense.”

“Okay,” Taako mused. He stretched out on the shore of the pool and focused on peeling off his boots. “It’s still early, so it probably won’t be too difficult. We could dig through Merle’s medical journals. He’s probably got an herbal concoction or something that can take care of it.”

“Yeah.”

“But if it’s too complicated, we might have to ask him to make it... I guess that’s up in the air. I don’t think he’d spill our beans to the rest of the crew, though. He’s good about that sort of thing.”

“M-hm.”

Taako paused in the middle of tossing his shoes into the grass behind him. Something about that little verbal filler noise his sister made hadn’t sounded quite right. He looked over at Lup to see she was still staring out across the water, ears tipped down and back, teeth worrying at her lip. She was thinking about something, but at the same time, trying very hard not to.

“You don’t seem totally on board with this,” Taako pointed out.

“No, I am,” Lup tersely replied. “It’s the right thing to do.”

“By whose standards?”

His sister shrugged. 

“You and I both know that you’re the only person who can make the call on this situation. I’m just here for moral support.” A long and uncomfortable silence followed before he added, “It’s just one option, you know. You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“I know it’s what I  _ should _ do,” Lup specified. “It’s the only responsible choice I can make. Everything is complicated enough as it is, and me bringing a baby into the picture is only going to make this whole mission that much harder on everyone. But at the same time...” She sighed and dug her fingers into her hair, pulling it back from her face. “Fuck, this all sounds  _ so stupid _ ...”

“No it doesn’t,” Taako countered. “If it’s bothering you this much, then it can’t be stupid.”

His sister held out on him for a few seconds, then finally caved. “It’s... Barry and I have talked about this before,” she confessed. “We’ve  _ been _ talking about it for the past few cycles, actually. A really long time ago, we both started thinking about what we were going to do when all of this is finally over. And I know that the more cycles we go through, the less likely it seems that this mission is ever going to end, but we still like to make plans and talk about having a life together. And part of that is, well... lately it’s included having kids.” She sighed, lowering her head to rest her chin on her knees. “It’s part of the reason I wanted to try making my organs work at all in the first place.”

Words seemed out of Taako’s reach for a moment. He remembered joking about this sort of thing with her and Barry; first comes love, then comes marriage and whatever the fuck else. They’d speculated over what the hell a combination of Barry and Lup would even look like (a little blonde, pointy-eared office supply store employee, probably). Taako had playfully threatened to spoil whatever offspring they had so much that he’d turn them against their parents. They were never serious, or at least, at the time, he hadn’t thought they were; on his own, he’d figured that he might really enjoy being an uncle, if or when that happened, but it had always seemed like a dream for a future that was a long way off. He’d never expected it to suddenly be placed in his lap with little to no warning in the middle of a million other things happening at once. 

“I know. Stupid, right?” Lup went on after he’d stayed quiet for slightly too long. “It would make sense just to terminate this one and wait until later, when the apocalypse isn’t looming over our heads every goddamn year. I know that the spell works on me, and I know I can recast it whenever I need to. Just because now isn’t a good time doesn’t mean that it’s never going to happen again. But it’s here. I have it. It’s in my hands, right now, right in front of me. And I... I can’t make myself let it go.”

“Then don’t.”

His sister turned to him, eyes wide. “Are you serious? Don’t encourage me. It’s a bad idea.”

“Maybe. But it’s not like you haven’t made bad ideas work before. And if this is something you really, really want, then the rest of us can find a way to work around it.”

Lup opened her mouth, ready to argue again, but she was out of verbal ammunition. Her brother knew her too well. “It’s just going to make everything so much more complicated.”

“As if there’s any part of this mission that isn’t complicated already? Lup, we landed on a planet where the fucking  _ ground _ is alive. At this point, you having a baby is just another drop in the ocean.”

His sister didn’t respond. In the ensuing silence, he could practically hear the mental gymnastics she was doing to find a reason to believe that this whole harebrained scheme might work. She probably hadn’t expected the conversation to go this way, and maybe had been fully prepared to go against her own wishes for the sake of the mission and the rest of the crew, but if she’d thought Taako was willing to pressure her into that, she’d thought wrong. He would rather be drawn and quartered than hurt his sister on purpose. So instead of drawing the argument out, they switched gears.

Taako shot first. “So, how long is this whole pregnancy thing going to take, anyway?”

“I’m not really sure,” Lup responded. “I know that the usual gestation period for us is two years, but Barry is human. They’re only pregnant for nine months. And it’s not like half-elves are rare or anything, but the time span between elf and human pregnancies is kind of a toss-up. It’ll probably be around a year and a half, give or take a few weeks.”

“So no matter what, going full-term is probably gonna take longer than one cycle.”

“I think so.”

The time span alone brought on a lot of questions, like when Lup was going to start showing, how she should be eating, how much sleep and exercise she should get, what about their lives was going to have to change as time went on, and then Taako’s train of thought went off the rails and landed in a ditch when he remembered why they had to think in terms of cycles at all. “Oh, shit.”

“What?”

“What about the reset?”

Lup had factored it into her plans when she’d started experimenting with the spell to bring her reproductive organs to life. It had been a safety cushion before, since when it all shut down at the start of another cycle, she could just cast the spell again, but the times, they were a-changing. Lup’s body hadn’t been pregnant at the start of the mission. It hadn’t even been able to  _ get _ pregnant. 

“Well... Fisher survived,” Lup reasoned. “She’s been through a ton of resets, and she’s doing just fine.”

“Yeah, but Fisher is a  _ voidfish _ ,” Taako pointed out. “Not only that, but she’s her own creature. It’s not like she’s attached to Magnus in any way. Right now, the baby really isn’t much more than an extension of you. Until you squeeze it out and cut the cord, the two of you are kind of a package deal.”

“Its signal came up different from mine when I cast Detect Life. That’s gotta count for something.”

“I guess so,” Taako figured. It wasn’t exactly a comforting thought to have. So much of this operation was going to have to be left up to chance. “What are we going to do about the rest of the crew?”

“They’re going to have to find out eventually. Once I start showing, it’s only gonna get harder to keep things quiet. Then when they find out, they’re definitely going to have questions. As it is, we barely understand what’s going on.”

“Yeah. And knowing Merle, he’s probably gonna start making you eat weird mushrooms for vitamins and shit.”

Lup snorted, a smile finally coming to life on her face. “So we keep this between us?”

“Between us,” Taako agreed. “For now, anyway.”

“I think I want to hold off on telling them until the next cycle,” she continued. “Not to rag on our friends or anything, but I don’t want them to know yet. I have no idea how they’re going to feel about all this, and if any of them are pissed off about it, I’d rather wait until we’re maybe in a better world than this one. Besides that, it would really suck if Barry was the last person to find out about it.”

Taako giggled, relieved that they’d finally sorted this out, at least halfway. “Yeah. Imagine his surprise when he comes back,” he joked. “Besides, by then, we’ll at least know if all of this is going to actually result in a baby.”

“Yeah.” He heard his sister laugh again, but this time, it sounded weak and humorless. She was staring off into the distance again. The air between them remained quiet, and Taako kicked himself for not thinking twice before speaking. Lup was dead-set on this course now. Obviously she wouldn’t want to think that the baby disappearing in the reset was a possibility, even though it most definitely was. Taako was afraid to start speculating on just how likely that would be.

* * *

The two of them took a dip in the stream before heading back to the ship, For the first time in weeks, things were finally starting to feel normal again. They weren’t, there hadn’t been doubt about that in decades, and the current cycle had gone more sideways than any previous cycle that Taako cared to remember, but no matter where they ended up, the IPRE crew always managed to piece together a new “normal” wherever they went.

Without the big dark indecisive cloud hanging over their heads, Taako finally knew what the hell he was supposed to do with Lup; it became his new self-assigned job to make sure she and the incoming baby stayed healthy. He woke her up in the morning, cooked for her, kept her hydrated and stayed at her side whenever cramps or nausea came back to haunt her. He’d also held back on judging her when she developed a habit of sneaking into the kitchen at random times, day or night, and throwing together the most disgusting combinations of foods that Taako had ever seen. Strong smells made Lup gag most of the time, and it was totally beyond him how his sister could stomach chocolate ice cream with buffalo wing sauce, marshmallow fluff, shrimp crackers and pickled jalapeños above anything else, but Lup’s body was doing a lot of weird things at the moment, and he didn’t understand it enough to question it.

He wasn’t sure if the rest of the crew had noticed the change in his behavior, or his sister’s for that matter, but he wasn’t sure that he cared either. If it was causing problems for any of them, they hadn’t mentioned it to him. Besides, they had bigger priorities, like trying to find out if the giant land-beasts could be communicated with and what their relationship was with the metal structures all over the world’s surface, especially looking into why they got so mad when said structures were touched, damaged or destroyed. He had a hand in all of that too, because what choice did he have, but he kept it on the back-burner in favor of his own main goal of taking care of Lup.

One month wore on into the next, and gradually Taako noticed his sister’s symptoms starting to change. The morning sickness tapered off, becoming moderate headaches and nausea that resulted in actual vomit significantly less than before. She’d started eating more, and her cravings seemed to only be getting weirder as she progressed. 

It was fascinating to watch. Taako couldn’t deny that. As long as he had been alive, he’d never been close to anyone who’d had a baby. The way he and Lup lived hadn’t allowed for much of that; anyone they used to know who either got pregnant or got someone else pregnant walked out of their lives pretty quickly. He had no idea what he was supposed to expect, so every new development was an eye-opening shock to him. 

Even better than the fixation his sister had given him, as time wore on, he started to gain something more from their situation. There was a small glowing ember of hope that had flickered to life in his mind; over the days spent keeping after his sister, he slowly realized that he was actually excited about this. After sixty-some cycles of sporadic failures and anticlimactic victories trying to figure out a way to stop the Hunger from consuming every world it touched, the concept of his sister having a baby had finally given him something he knew for sure he could look forward to. At least, he hoped that he had that. Month eight of the cycle had rolled in, and the reality of where they were and what was coming sank its teeth deeper into him with every passing week.

The crew was no closer to finding the Light of Creation than they’d been at the beginning. In fact, they were probably even further away from it now. It was like the more they learned about this world, the less hope they had of saving it.

There had been a reason they’d spent month after month with no ability to find the Light. The living ground creatures had gotten a hold of it the day it had landed, and for some indiscernible reason, they were keeping it away from the IPRE crew. Maybe they understood what it was and the kind of power it held and didn’t trust the crew to handle it responsibly. Maybe they just hated them for landing on their planet without permission (it wouldn’t have been the first time that had happened). Trying to communicate with them was proving more dangerous than anything they had done before.

Chances were that they were still pissed about the crew tampering with their towers and spheres. And they were indeed the ones who had constructed those; they were artificial structures with no physical connection to the grounds’ living bodies, other than the fact that they were made from the connective veins of metal that ran across their rocky skin. They conducted psychic energy, and since the land beasts hardly moved or did anything else productive, they had plenty of that to go around. They used them as a defensive measure to hide themselves from the rest of the universe, or at least that was as much as the crew could piece together on their own, given the headaches that the magic-users had suffered through and the Starblaster’s radars and sensors being so out of whack. This place probably wouldn’t have even registered as an existing planet if they had come across it on their own. But, of course, it wasn’t up to them where they landed. They just ended up wherever the Light of Creation decided to place them.

That didn’t change how angry the creatures were about their presence. The living ground didn’t seem to care that they hadn’t landed here by choice. Trying to explain their situation to them didn’t help; by then, it seemed less like the planet’s residents couldn’t understand them and more like they were refusing to speak to them out of spite. Trying to talk things over was hopeless, and the most it resulted in was Magnus being mercilessly crushed underneath one’s massive clawed foot.

After the second death of the mission, Taako tried to convince Davenport to bail on their efforts to keep this world alive. It was clear that they weren’t getting anywhere. There was hardly any time left in the cycle. Finding the Light was obviously hopeless, the living ground wouldn’t give them the time of day, and besides that, any of these creatures could simply swat every last one of them like insects without a second thought. Their crew was already down one Barry and one Magnus, and it might have been better just to cut their losses, go back to the forest and at least have a little bit of peace and quiet before this world got wrecked to shit and they were forced to move on. As he should have expected, Captain-port refused, ever faithful to their mission. He was determined to keep trying to convince the living ground to return the Light of Creation to them; surely, if they kept at it, they would eventually succeed. 

That effort lasted about a month, and it ended with Davenport getting steamrolled just as easily as Barry and Magnus. After that, there was a unanimous agreement among the last living crew members that the mission was a bust; month ten of the cycle was just around the corner, and the best they could do was stay alive until the next one. Lucretia drove the Starblaster back to the forest, and that was where they stayed.

No more mission, no more deaths and no more worrying about the ground changing under their feet. At long last, Lup wouldn’t be in danger anymore, and Taako could go to sleep every night without lying awake and worrying about her.

* * *

Month ten swept in, and though Taako didn’t spend  _ every _ waking moment with Lup, he sure crammed her into his schedule however much she was willing to fit. There wasn’t much to do in a world where no one like them lived. The forest at least was devoid of any kind of life other than grass, trees and moss, so hikes out into the terrain were always pleasant and free of bug bites. Weather was pretty constant; throughout their whole stay on this planet, the sky had remained cloudy, the air had ranged from cool to lukewarm, it was always humid, and rain was a rare luxury. However, given the fact that the sky was literally  _ always _ cloudy and the air  _ always _ damp, rain usually came suddenly and without any warning, which was exactly what happened one day when he and Lup had decided to wander out and get some fresh air.

The two of them were drenched within minutes. They tried to make a mad dash back toward the ship, but they’d gone too far for it to be worth the trip, and given the current downpour that was soaking them both to the skin, they agreed they’d be better off taking shelter somewhere nearby until the storm calmed down. It was a short sprint toward a tree with wide, flat leaves and a split trunk that cast its limbs low enough for them to climb up into its sheltered branches. They hunkered down in the fork of the trunk, leaning back against either side of it, and quietly watched the rain fall over the forest. 

“Hey, Taako?”

“Yeah?”

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

He turned to face his sister. She’d stood up to stretch her legs after being crouched in the shelter of the trunk for so long, and he could recognize the intent on her face when she looked at him. 

“Do I look different to you?” 

He cocked his head, turning his ears to focus on her and block out the rain. “Different how?”

“I don’t know,” she mused. “It’s just that... Maybe it’s all me. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. I might just be thinking about everything too much.” While she talked, Taako noticed her hand drift towards her abdomen, as it was prone to doing, and right away he caught on to what she was talking about. 

Her wet clothes clung to her body, sticking to her form like a second skin. Taako hadn’t noticed it before because she’d been wearing Barry’s shirt, which was way too big on her. But the second she asked him, the fabric stuck to her and one errant hand literally pointing him right it, it was impossible to miss. It was faint, barely noticeable, but Lup was starting to show. The shape of her belly had softened, now ever so slightly rounder than before. The way her hand rested around the curve of it, he thought maybe she’d felt her stomach starting to grow before she’d been able to see it.

The question she’d asked had been kind of loaded, and he wasn’t sure if she wanted him to say no or yes or something in between or ask her why she thought it mattered. He couldn’t help himself, and the second he caught on to what she was asking, the first thing out of his mouth was, “Awww, Lulu!”

His sister’s ears twitched, and he saw color rising to her face. “What?”

“You’re showing. Oh my god, you look so cute!”

She turned away, but Taako could still see the pinkish glow in her cheeks and the smile that had come to life on her face. A giggle bubbled up from her chest. “Of course that’s the first thing you’d say about it.”

“What? It’s true. You’re adorable,” Taako insisted. “When Barry comes back, he’s going to lose his mind.” He paused a second, hesitating to ask permission for the one thing he was absolutely dying to do, then figured he may as well, because why the hell not. “Is it okay if I touch it?”

“Sure. Go ahead,” his sister replied. She lowered herself back down into the fork of the trunk. “May as well let you do it before we tell everyone else. I’ve heard that once you get further along, people stop asking for permission.”

A big, dorky smile bloomed on Taako’s face and he carefully crossed the gap to settle himself a little closer to Lup. He reached out to carefully place his hand on her belly and his heart skipped a beat. She was warm, soft and solid under his palm, and if he focused, he could almost feel the little aura of the life growing inside her.

“Wow,” he said breathlessly, unable to look away. “This is happening. It’s really happening.”

“Feels weird, doesn’t it?” Lup idly asked. “Almost like it’s a really vivid dream.”

“If it’s a dream, then I really don’t care to know what happens when we wake up. This is... amazing.” He sighed, watching his fingers trace gentle circles over the curve of his sister’s abdomen. “Can I say something stupid?”

“Everything is stupid if you look at it that way,” she replied. “What is it?”

“I’m really glad that this happened,” Taako confessed. “Or at least, I am right now. I wasn’t always. This cycle has been rough. More than rough. It’s sucked worse than any that we’ve had in a while. There’s so much that could have made it better. Barry could still be here, we could have found the Light, and we’d be much better off if the fucking  _ ground _ wasn’t trying to kill us at every turn. But even after all of that, after failing to do the one job we always have to do and after everybody who died this time around, I’m glad I still have you.” He took a second to glance back down at her belly. “Both of you.”

Lup snorted, blushing even harder now, and when Taako took his hand back, he saw that she was smiling at him. “I’m glad I still have you too,” she said. “And that I’m still alive at all.”

“Yeah. If I let you die knowing what was going on with you, I’d be a really shitty brother, wouldn’t I?”

They both laughed, and outside their shelter of branches, the rain was finally starting to let up. Carefully, they helped each other climb down. The dirt was essentially just spongy mud and even if it wasn’t pouring it was still raining; there would be a huge mess to clean up when they returned to the ship. Despite that, Taako looked forward to it. There would be tea, blankets, and maybe a movie waiting for them on board. As they walked back, Taako reached for his sister’s hand, and she squeezed her cold, wet fingers around his own. They wouldn’t be alone in this endeavor for much longer. It would probably be better that way, but Taako still found something precious in sharing this secret with his sister. For a few more weeks, it would be theirs and theirs alone, and he fully intended to savor that time for all it was worth.

* * *

The last weeks of the cycle were spent anxiously counting down the days until the Hunger came and the reset sent them off elsewhere in space. He wasn’t dreading the world being destroyed this time around. The universe was probably better off without a planet like this one. He had much more important things to dread, for instance, the mere thought of anything going wrong with Lup.

It wasn’t as hard as he’d worried it might be to keep the baby situation under wraps. He and Lup both had a talent for fashioning outfits for all intents and purposes, so it was easy for them to put together a wardrobe that would hide Lup’s gradually swelling stomach from the rest of the crew. Lup had taken to wearing Barry’s shirts already. It was easy enough for them to pretend that she was simply gearing up to welcome her boyfriend back into her life. 

The baby’s elf genes ensured that it would develop slowly, so there wasn’t very much at all to notice just yet, but it was better to be safe than sorry. Besides, in Taako’s eyes, with every passing week his sister seemed just a little bit more... well,  _ pregnant _ . Merle and Lucretia never said a word about his sister being odd or different somehow; the closest they came was when Merle told Lup she was glowing one morning, which she brushed off as excitement over seeing Barry again, which wasn’t a total lie. Merle had taken it easily, and Lucretia didn’t argue over it either, so they must not have been picking up on Lup’s vibes like Taako did. Either way, he was getting increasingly anxious about what they had to hide. 

He’d been trying not to think about the reset, what it might do to his sister, or her body, or the baby currently calling her its home. He supposed that catching feelings about it was an inevitability; admitting it to himself made him ache, but he was starting to love his up-and-coming niece, or nephew, or whatever it turned out to be when it was old enough to tell them who it was. It wasn’t a feeling like any that he’d ever had before. He didn’t generally care for people he didn’t know, and how the fuck could he  _ know _ someone who wasn’t even a person yet? All the same, seeing how his sister felt, the faint smiles that lingered on her face, laughing her way through mood swings, nasty cravings and morning sickness, the little clandestine moments where she rested her hand on her stomach and rubbed it with her fingers, had done something to him. Feelings that had started with her had flared up and spread to him like a virus.

God, if the reset fucked this up for them, they would both be screwed.

Taako only found it harder to sleep as they counted down the last few days to the Hunger’s arrival. It was an easy excuse to follow Lup to the kitchen and supervise her while she threw together another barely-passing-for-edible monstrosity from the fridge. By then, he knew she was doing okay on her own. She wasn’t sick nearly as often, nor was she confused or panicking anymore. Now, it seemed, the tables had turned; Taako felt like he was constantly hurtling through the uncertain void of space and couldn’t stand to be alone anymore. His sister was all that could calm him down.

“I’ve been thinking about something,” Lup thought out loud as she minced a mound of red licorice on the counter. “When Barry comes back, we’re going to have to come up with a name.”

Taako reached around her knife and stole a rope from the pile before his sister cut it to bits. It was a little after midnight, eleven days left until the Hunger was due to arrive. “Naming things is always easier said than done, isn’t it? I mean, look at the name of this ship. The fucking Starblaster.”

Lup scoffed, frowned at him and tried to snatch the licorice back from him, but he stuffed it into his mouth before she could take it. “Hey. Starblaster is a badass name, and you can fight me on that,” she argued. “And it’s not like you could have done any better.”

“Whatever. Just promise me you’re not going to name your kid something dumb, like... Moondancer or some shit.”

“You know what? I just decided. I’m going to name the baby Moondancer, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.” She picked up the licorice bits on the side of her knife and defiantly dumped them on top of a bowl of cut-up hot dogs, apricot jam, crushed cheese puffs, caramelized bananas and a generous puddle of hot sauce. 

Taako wrinkled his nose at the powerful smell that wafted off of the bowl. “I don’t know what’s grosser; your taste in names, or that bowl of garbage you’re about to shovel into your mouth right now.”

“Shows what you know about taste,” Lup teased right back, jamming a spoon into the bowl and stirring it all up. She scooped up a generous spoonful and gently placed it on her tongue, closed her eyes and moaned. “Mmmm, it’s  _ perfect _ .”

Taako rolled his eyes. “Ugh. Save it for Barry, you horny bastard.”

“You’re just jealous because there was nobody in this world for you to hook up with, aren’t you?”

“Okay, listen!” he tossed back, pretending to be offended. “I’m only a mortal man.”

“And so was... what was his name?”

“Fuck if I remember.”

In a horrifying turn of events, Lup managed to polish off half the bowl in the span of less than a minute. “Shows what you know about romance.”

“Hey. Not all of us were lucky enough to be stuck on a spaceship with people who have the same preferences as us and have decades to spare to fall in love.”

“I’m still surprised you took it as well as you did. You’ve never liked anyone that I dated before.”

“Well... Barry is different. I know him, I know how well he knows you. Above all, really, I trust him. And he came to me for help when he didn’t know how to get around his feelings for you. I hadn’t seen anyone do that until him. And, you know... you just make each other so happy. Who the hell am I to say that you weren’t right for each other?”

Lup nodded quietly and scooped another spoonful of her concoction into her mouth. She kept quiet until she’d finished the entire bowl, after which she took a deep breath and leaned her head onto the kitchen table. “I miss him.”

“Me too,” Taako admitted. He slid down from the counter to rest a reassuring hand on Lup’s back. “He’ll be back soon.”

“I know. I’m just so nervous.”

So was Taako, but he wasn’t about to say that to her face. “About what?”

“Everything. What the fuck isn’t there to be nervous about? So much has changed in the past cycle. When he comes back, I’m gonna have to drop so much news on him and I don’t know what he’s going to say, or what the rest of the crew is going to think, or if the next world we end up in is going to fuck it all up, or... ah, son of a bitch. I could go on all night if I wasn’t so fucking tired.”

Externally, Taako remained calm, placidly rubbing the tense spot between his sister’s shoulders. Internally, his mind had crossed out the  _ son of a bitch _ that had come after the last  _ or _ and filled in that blank with what he knew they were both trying their damnedest not to think about. But he was thinking about it anyway. Not just that, his inner self seemed to be pointing at it and screaming  _ hey asshole, this is a thing which is definitely going to happen! _

“You should get some sleep, then,” he told her, ignoring his own internal screaming as much as he could. “Tomorrow is a big day, even though it’s not.”

His sister’s back shivered as she laughed. “Shit, you’ve got a point.” She scooted her chair back and took her bowl to the sink. “With any luck, my cravings won’t wake me up at fuck o’clock in the morning like they did yesterday.”

“After that disaster you just ate, I certainly hope they don’t.”

She stuck her tongue out at him and continued washing her dishes. The bowl and spoon were left out to dry, and Taako followed her into the bathroom to brush his teeth for the second time that night. “Hey, would you mind letting me chill in your room for a little while?”

Lup could probably smell his anxiety. “Sure,” she said. “Just don’t pass out before I do, okay?”

“No promises.”

She rinsed her toothbrush off in the sink and stepped out the door, on the way to her room. Halfway down the hall, Taako heard her footsteps come to a sudden standstill. Seconds later, she’d turned around and sprinted back to the bathroom. She was hanging off the doorframe, breathless and smiling. “Taako, stop what you’re doing right now and give me your hand.”

He threw down the washcloth he’d been using to wipe cleanser off his face and rushed to the door, offering his hand up to Lup. “What is it?”

She didn’t give him an answer, at least not one in words. His sister pressed his hand flat to her faintly swollen belly and asked, “Do you feel that?”

He didn’t, at first, but the longer he let his hand rest on her stomach, the stronger the feeling became. A faint, lively little flutter tickled the palm of his hand, like his sister had a moth trapped in her guts.

“Holy shit. Is that kicking?”

Lup nodded, her hand pressing Taako’s a little tighter to herself. “I just started feeling it today,” she said. “At first, I thought I was psyching myself out and imagining it, but it kept coming back. I’ve been waiting all night for it to start again so you could feel it.”

“Oh my god.” Laughter welled up in Taako’s chest as the baby’s quick, tiny movements nudged against his palm. “This thing is fucking hyper. Look at it go.”

“I guess the bananas foster woke it up.”

When his sister giggled, he felt it reverberate through his hand, and the baby’s frantic kicking slowed down. He looked up from his sister’s stomach to her face and saw that there were tears swimming in her eyes. The smile on her face read more plainly than anything she could have said right then.

It was a monumental task, but he still pulled his hand back from her and stood up. “Okay, sis. Let’s get you to bed.”

Minutes later, they were sprawled out side by side on Lup’s bed. Lup was leaned back against the pillows, her tablet propped up on her chest, reading one of the downloaded books she’d probably already read a hundred times over. Taako had curled up next to her on his side, doing nothing in particular. He would think of something to say every few minutes, and after a dozen sentences or so, the topic of conversation would wear itself out and they would fall back into silence. He didn’t mention that he was taking this time to study the softly rounded shape of her belly until he’d memorized it. He watched it slowly rise and fall with her breath, trying to find some comfort in the rhythm. Now and again he’d let his hand drift over it and dance his fingertips lightly across its warm surface until the tiny thing inside woke up and started kicking again and he felt Lup’s laughter as she playfully told him to stop because it tickled so much. Eventually, when he allowed himself to poke at his sister’s belly one more time and felt the tiny kicks against his fingers yet again, he didn’t hear a response from Lup; he looked up towards her to ask her a question and saw she’d fallen asleep, face tipped sideways into a pillow, tablet fallen flat on her chest with a screen that had gone dark who-knows-how-long ago.

She drifted briefly back into consciousness while Taako was lifting the tablet out of her limp hands. She sat up, just lucid enough to give him a smile and ask if he was heading back to his own room. He was, so she pulled him into her arms, gave him a kiss on the cheek and told him to sleep well. He hugged her back, just as tight, and did the same for her, then confessed he had one last dumb little request. She giggled and told him it was fine, if he wanted to so badly, so he dipped his head toward Lup’s stomach and gave it a kiss as well. For luck, he told her, before he said goodnight to them both and went off on his own.

The fear didn’t really settle in until he’d closed his bedroom door behind him. He wondered if she felt it too. He genuinely hoped she didn’t, but with a wall between them, he could only know so much. His body moved like a zombie as he flicked off the light and staggered to his bed. He knew he wasn’t going to sleep that night. This cycle seemed doomed to begin and end the same way for him, and there were only ten more days before it would all be over. It was all he could do to lay awake until sunrise and hope desperately that when the reset finally came, nothing would go wrong. He wasn’t ready to lose the one good thing that had come out of this hellish cycle. Neither was Lup.

* * *

When the Hunger finally arrived, it was almost a relief. Then the screaming started.

The towers went haywire within minutes. When the columns of roiling darkness broke through the cloud layer and delved into the surface of the world, not even wearing two signal blockers at once could drown out the noise. That was the drawback of having only magic users left in the crew; the migraine was hitting all of them at once, and driving a large spaceship while being blinded by pain was a real bitch of a task. The atmosphere rang with the terrified wails of the living ground as they tore themselves up from the bedrock and tried to run away from the invading sludge that was slowly consuming their home world. 

_ Screw them _ , Taako thought angrily to himself as he struggled to navigate the dissolving landscape and help Lucretia’s desperate efforts to steer.  _ After the shit they pulled on us, they deserve this. _

The ride out of the atmosphere was uncommonly rough. No other planet had given them the extra challenge of having to dodge the flailing limbs, tails, necks and bodies of mountain-sized monstrosities as they rose through the cloud layer. Taako was nearly ready to vomit from the ship swerving wildly back and forth. Lup couldn’t have been faring much better, hiding down in the sickbay with Merle.

_ Lup. Oh fuck, Lup. I can’t think about you right now. Just please be okay. _

Squinting through the pain of the cacophony that this dying world raised in his brain, Taako spotted a glimmer of light somewhere beyond the dense fog. He pointed toward it, frantically screaming directions at Lucretia, who swung the ship’s controls into a hard left and slammed the accelerator. The bond engine whined, and they ducked underneath an incoming tendril of Hunger before speeding headlong into the gap of light. Eyes opened all around them, there was an awful squelching of slime closing in around the ship, and then a sudden white light spilled through the windshield, flooding the bridge and blinding them both.

Taako felt the familiar burn and release that he’d felt sixty-something times before. When his vision came back to him, he was standing near the back of the room instead of right up front by the controls. Davenport was where Lucretia had been standing, looking shaken but intact, Barry was next to him, he heard Magnus’s voice joining Lucretia’s down the hall, mentioning something about someone’s black eye. And just like that, the reset was complete.

Taako slumped sideways against the doorframe and let out a breath he didn’t remember holding. It was over. Finally, that total shitwaste of a cycle was over, and they could all move on. 

His relief lasted for only a second before he remembered Lup.

His sister was standing only a few feet away from him, leaned over the sensor readings, though she didn’t seem to be reading anything now. He wasted no time running over to her and placing his hand on her back. She wasn’t looking at him, but an encouraging smile crept onto his face anyway. “Hey, Lup. We made it,” he said.

Lup didn’t respond.

Taako’s heart stopped. Everything about this was wrong. His sister had one hand braced against the edge of the sensor panel, clinging to it like she’d lose her balance if she let go. The other was pressed tight against her stomach, fingers clawed into the fabric of her shirt. She stared straight ahead into the screens in front of her, seeing nothing, and oh, god, the look on her face made every organ in Taako’s body turn to stone. She was pale and frozen in panic, eyes wide and glassy, lips parted around strained breath that came in tiny, trembling gasps. 

“Lup?” he said again, his voice shrinking into a whisper. “What’s wrong?”

“Lup!” Barry called out from across the bridge.

Taako turned around to face him, and his life seemed to be moving in slow motion. Barry was rushing across the room towards Lup, a huge, glowing smile on his face. Oblivious. Not even half a clue as to what had happened, just happy to be alive again, happy to see his girlfriend was still here. But she wasn’t, not totally. She was stuck like her soul had lagged behind her body. When Taako looked back at his sister, she was still frozen, and his eyes flicked down. Her fingers tightened around her shirt. Only then did he notice the dark stain of blood that was slowly creeping down her leg. 

He didn’t think before he acted. He just grabbed Lup by her arm and bolted for the hallway, ignoring the confused voices of the others in the bridge. His sister stumbled after him as he sprinted for the closest bathroom. With one fluid movement, he shoved her through the doorway, ducked in after her, slammed the door shut behind them and turned the lock. Everything that came after seemed to happen all at once.

Right away, Lup doubled over and sank to the floor, and a sob broke free from her lungs. Her hands still clutched at her belly, unable, unwilling to let go while the rest of her body trembled helplessly. Taako’s consciousness stalled, like a computer error had taken over his brain for a few seconds while it tried to process what the hell he was seeing. Slowly, it sank in, and when he finally regained control of his limbs, he crouched down to the floor and started scrambling to move Lup into the shower.

As soon as he was within reach, his sister latched onto him, her shaking hands grasping at handfuls of his hair and shirt if only to have something to hold on to. She huddled against him, breath hot against his ear, panting and whimpering and soaking his shoulder with tears. He’d never seen her like this before, not in all their years, nor all their cycles. He’d never seen her in so much pain.

People were knocking on the door. He heard voices but couldn’t understand them over the strangled noises Lup was making. Quietly swearing, he untangled himself from his sister to get to the awkward task of peeling off her tights and skirt. Both were thoroughly drenched with blood by then, the mess seeping through fabric and spreading across the tiles in a thin red trail. She tried to help him, but she could hardly move. Someone knocked again. Taako whirled around and snarled at them to leave him and his sister the fuck alone.

The trickle of blood on the tiles quickly turned into a generous pool that oozed slowly toward the drain in a dense red river. He pulled himself from his sister’s grasp to turn on the shower. Even as the warm water sprayed over both of them, the look of the floor didn’t change; as quickly as the water washed it away, more gushed out to replace it. Lup’s back arched against the wall and she cried out, her face crumpled into a mask of anguish.

Taako didn’t care that his hands were smeared with blood or that he was getting soaked. His sister was suffering, he didn’t know how to stop it, and for the time being, nothing else mattered.

He gave her his hand, and she nearly broke his fingers from squeezing it so hard. Instinct told him to hold her, keep her safe, even though nothing was safe right now, nothing was right, and there was no way in hell it was going to be. Lup was whimpering into his shoulder. There was so much blood. He hadn’t even known her veins could hold this much. No matter how much she lost, it just kept on coming. 

It went on for so long. He half-expected, half-feared that something or pieces of something might eventually come sloughing out, but nothing did. It was only blood, and more blood, and even more blood after that, spilling across the tiles and down the drain. Someone would knock on the door every now and again, and sometimes they would say something that Taako couldn’t hear. He was numb, his whole body feeling sore and empty as his reality gradually sank in.

This was what a miscarriage looked like. The reset had come and gone, and it had taken Lup’s baby with it. 

Just yesterday, it had been there. He’d talked to it, touched it, felt it kicking inside his sister’s belly. It had been there, and his heart ached for it, wishing it still was, but it had been... what? Wiped out of existence? What even happened to living things when the reset destroyed them?

His sister’s zero state was so far removed from what she had become over the last cycle. Her reproductive organs didn’t work in the beginning. There had been nothing growing inside her, nor even the possibility that something could be. She’d changed, then been unchanged, something in her had probably died, and now her body was left convulsing in pain, bleeding profusely and struggling to figure out what the hell just happened to it. 

Time passed. Taako had no idea how much. It only felt long and excruciating, like the blood would never stop coming and Lup’s pain would have no end. But eventually, it did. The gushing stream of red that pooled on the shower floor thinned out, fading to pink, then the water ran clear around Lup’s legs and the convulsions finally stopped. Her hands lost their grip on Taako, and she went limp in his arms, her faint, labored gasps for air the only sign that she was still alive. It was over. Every last remnant of what she’d had before was gone.

It took only a few seconds before she burst into tears. 

Her face was already stained, and her eyes already red. There shouldn’t have been anything left in her after what she’d just been through, but Taako could feel it coming over him as well. Lup buried her face in the side of his neck, and the onslaught finally came; it was small at first, a sporadic shiver in her body, a few weak little gasps, but it grew quickly, hitting her harder with each strained breath she forced into her lungs, until she was wrapped around Taako again, openly sobbing against her brother’s shoulder. 

Her body had given up on feeling pain. What she felt now was a different kind of hurt, a deeper one which couldn’t be fixed with painkillers or a bandage. She was steeped in it, aching with it, and the horrible weight of it had pulled Taako under along with her. He tried to keep quiet, in spite of the tears streaming down his face. She was already wailing, he knew the crew could hear them and they didn’t need to listen to  _ two _ devastated elves shrieking their pain out to the deaf ears of the uncaring universe, He tried to make up for it with low, incoherent mumbles, something along the lines of “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry” as if apologizing would even help, as if there were something he could have done to save her. He knew there wasn’t, and he yet still felt like he’d failed.

All he could do was hold her. He could be here, try to keep her afloat, stroke her hair and desperately whisper to her that it was okay, she was okay, but she wasn’t, it wasn’t, and it never would be again.

When Taako finally staggered out of the bathroom, he the first clock he looked at told him that four hours had passed. The Starblaster had found its next destination, and they were hovering just outside the airspace of this new world while Davenport talked to some stranger on the ground, bargaining for permission to approach. While all this had been going on, Lup had been trapped in the bathroom, convulsing and bleeding for the past four hours. 

She’d been a mess. She still was, in a manner of speaking, but she was the one who asked him to leave her alone to take a shower. Taako had promised to bring her a change of clothes, and he’d stepped out into the hallway, still dripping wet. Of course Barry had been waiting right outside. Of course he was sitting on the floor, leaned back against the opposite wall, looking half asleep from having been rooted to the spot for so long.

The second he saw Taako emerge, he was wide awake and scrambling to get to his feet. “What happened?” he asked. “Is she okay?”

Taako’s throat tightened at the sight of him. Slowly, he shook his head. His vision was still blurry, but he swore to himself a while back that he wasn’t going to cry in front of Barry. When he blinked the tears away, he saw Lup’s boyfriend staring at him with almost the same horrified expression that his sister had worn four hours earlier. 

“What happened?” he asked again.

Taako coughed, cleared his throat, and finally said, “We need to talk.”

Slowly, he led Barry away from the bathroom and toward the dorms, finally stopping in Lup’s room. While Taako rifled through her closet, looking for something warm and comfortable for his sister to wear, he explained everything. It would only take a few words, but they were harder to spit out than anything he’d ever said before.

“Barry, when you died in the last cycle...” he began. “You know, how she’d cast that spell on herself, and she thought it had stopped working-“

“She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”

Taako’s heart leapt up into his throat. Lup had been right all along; Barry already knew. He turned around, his sister’s clothes bunched up in his arms, and found himself trapped between saying yes and no; Barry was right, or he had been for a while, and now he wasn’t anymore. No matter which word he tried to say, it just wouldn’t come out, so he nodded, paused, then shook his head. Barry still had that look on his face, so scared of what would come next. Some part of him must have known that his lucky guess wasn’t the end of the story; Lup’s cries in the bathroom couldn’t have sounded pretty.

“She...” Taako tried to speak, but a lump quickly welled up in his throat. He pressed a hand to his mouth to choke it back down and tried to start over. “She  _ was _ pregnant. She just lost the baby.”

The sound Barry made wasn’t quite a gasp. He didn’t know what to make of it, but it had a bite, one that festered and stung like the blade of a poisoned knife. That must have been how it felt. He had just returned from being dead for the past seven months only to have this news hit him like a truck. Taako watched him slump forward and cover his mouth with his hands. “Oh my god...”

“It was the reset,” Taako went on, unable to stop himself. “We don’t know how it happened. As soon as we left that last world, it was just...” His voice failed him, and his eyes were tearing up again. He couldn’t stop it this time. “It was just gone.”

For a painfully long time, Barry didn’t speak, only stared blankly at the wall while Taako tried not to start crying all over again. He managed to hold himself together, at least for the moment. Right now, it was Barry’s turn to fall to pieces, and fall to pieces he certainly did. It happened fast; one second he was deathly still, not quite finished with processing the news, and the next he’d torn his glasses off and buried his face into his hand. “God, I’m such an idiot...” he choked. “Why the fuck didn’t I say anything? I knew. I didn’t know, but I  _ knew _ . I should have stayed alive. I should have been with her.”

“No, no, Barry, please...” Taako dropped the clothes onto the bed and pulled the weeping man into a hug. “This isn’t your fault.”

“Yes, it is. If I’d been there... If I’d just stayed alive with her, if I’d helped, maybe we could have done something. We could’ve-”

“You couldn’t have.”

Barry pulled back just enough to look at him with his red, watery eyes. “How do you know?”

“Because I... I don’t. I don’t know anything.”

With that, Barry’s head fell against his chest and the tears kept falling. Taako couldn’t think of much else to do then let him cry into his pre-drenched shirt. Eventually Barry managed to stop drowning in his guilt long enough to sit up and wipe the tears from his face. “I need to see her,” he said firmly, or as firmly as he could when his voice sounded like he was speaking underwater. “I need to tell her I’m sorry.”

“I don’t think she’ll know what you’re apologizing for,” Taako sighed. “But she should be out of the bathroom soon. I’ll let her know you're here waiting for her.”

“Okay.”

Taako walked out, taking his sister’s clothes with him to drop off in the bathroom. Once that was done, he returned to his own room to shed his now-cold wet clothes in favor of something dry, then buried his face in a blanket and gave himself five minutes to scream all his grief out before going back to join Barry in his sister’s room. Even after all that, his heart didn’t feel finished with him. It only wanted one thing (the baby that no longer existed) and it wouldn’t be satisfied with anything else. No amount of screaming, crying or mourning could bring back what all of them had lost.

When Lup came back, she seemed shocked to see Barry sitting on her bed next to her brother. They locked eyes through the doorway, and right away Barry rushed toward her and pulled her into the biggest, warmest hug he could manage. It started Lup crying all over again; everything around her felt like too much. Her boyfriend cradled her against his chest, kissed her head over and over, only pulling back to wipe the tears from her eyes with his thumbs.

“Barry...” she whimpered, looking up at him through her tears. “Barry, I-“

“It’s okay,” he murmured. “I already know. You don’t have to say it.”

And beyond that, there was really nothing else anyone  _ could _ say. Lup buried her face into her boyfriend’s chest and wrapped her skinny arms around him as tight as she could. He returned the favor, and that felt to Taako like his cue to leave. His body ached getting up from the bed, but he forced himself to do it anyway. He’d already had his moment to grieve with his sister; it was time for Barry to have his.

Barry raised his head from Lup’s hair when he noticed Taako stepping out into the hall. Lup must have noticed too, because suddenly her hand shot out and grabbed his, and she was looking at him over Barry’s shoulder. “You’ll be right next door?” she weakly asked. 

Taako nodded. “I always am.”

“Come back soon, okay?”

He promised he would. Lup pulled his hand to her lips and pressed a kiss to his knuckles, giving his hand one more squeeze before she let him go. The door swung shut behind him, and he returned to his own room, staggered to his bed and fell over into it like a wilting corpse. He didn’t have an ounce of energy left in him. He didn’t care that the ship was landing in a new world. He didn’t care that their search for the Light of Creation was starting all over again. Nothing felt like it mattered anymore, and all Taako wanted to do was sleep. Maybe, if he managed to avoid dreaming, he wouldn’t have to feel anything for the next few hours.

Taako would see in the morning, whenever that happened to be, just how much the rest of the crew knew about everything that had happened in the last cycle. Some of them might have guessed; but if they hadn’t, whatever. They didn’t need to know. Taako didn’t want them to know. He was sure that Barry and Lup wouldn’t either. They didn’t need sympathy or awkward condolences or having it come up in conversation whenever the others saw fit. The only thing that could help them now was time. The walk through the stages of grief was going to be a slow and painful one, but they had to take it.

Lying there in his dark room, Taako ached for his sister. He desperately didn’t want to be alone; being by himself only reminded him of the emptiness, the great dark void that had opened up in his heart at the start of this new cycle. That just seemed to be the way things fell into place, though; he wasn’t the one that his sister needed right now, so he burrowed under his blankets and tried and failed not to think about how much he was hurting. Barry must have been hurting even more than him. And Lup... good god, he couldn’t even imagine what she must have felt. 

They could have this time to themselves. Maybe that was what all of them needed.

**Author's Note:**

> I’m sorry for making this. Goodnight.


End file.
